


Sleep and All Its Motives

by SquirrellyThief



Category: Johnny the Homicidal Maniac, VASQUEZ Jhonen - Works
Genre: Creepypasta crossover, Crossover, Jeff the Killer - Freeform
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2012-11-03
Updated: 2014-10-29
Packaged: 2017-11-17 17:06:02
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 8
Words: 22,066
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/553885
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SquirrellyThief/pseuds/SquirrellyThief
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Johnny, as a boy, had a friend that shared his morbid interests, even taught him a few things. Together they pursued their respective targets and had a grand time. Until Johnny became a target.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Prologue: Present Day

PROLOGUE: Present Day

The bathroom light stings his eyes a bit. He had just gotten them to see in the darkness of the sleeping house. He blinks and his eyes adjust enough that he can navigate the narrow space without bumping against the sink or falling into the bathtub.

The necessary first-aid supplies have been moved to the front of the medicine cabinet for his convenience; a small detail that he is grateful for. He splashes some bactine on the deep scratch on his arm. Damn woman had harpy nails and clawed him up something awful. The disinfectant stings harshly and he curses under his breath, not wanting to alert the inhabitants to his presence. Not that it isn’t normal at this point.

He hears the padding of soft footsteps coming up the hall and locks the door. Squee’s parents had given him very little cause for alarm, but the last thing he needed was a confrontation with a man he’d nearly blinded only a few months ago. His day was rough enough. The steps padded past him, and, when he heard a door open and close up the hall, he unlocked the door and stepped out.

The house isn’t sleeping anymore.

There is a stillness. An unnatural quiet around him. At first, he thinks the pungent bite of blood and death hanging in the air was just his clothing, then he remembers he’d changed out of his bloody clothes before he came here. He ponders a bit as he retraces his steps down the hall to the top of the stairs.

He hears screaming and commotion up the hall. A shuffling of footsteps, Squee desperately pleading for his parents to help him, and they either won’t listen or don’t…

No-

They’re already dead.

The realization hits him as hard as he slams into the bedroom door. Feeling heroic, he knocks it open with a single solid kick and is met with the back of the attacker, and the full volume of the boy’s screams of terror. He pulls a knife from his belt loop and plunges it into the man’s back, but he’s made too much noise already, and the assailant turns in time to only get a deep gash in the arm instead of a stab wound to the back.

The man turns around fully, bringing a hand up to stop the bleeding in his arm. Wild, bright eyes lock on to the cause of the wound. He makes a disgusting noise as he speaks, “Johnny?” It is not confused, or even alarmed. It sounds almost…fond.

Suddenly Nny isn’t feeling very heroic anymore.


	2. 1: Years Prior

CHAPTER ONE: Years Prior

The cashier isn’t amused when Johnny comes into the little gas station store in the middle of the night. What the hell is a twelve year old boy doing coming into a place like this at two in the morning? Honestly. The cashier has half a mind to call the boy’s parents. If he thought he had any. The kid walks up to the counter, freezie in hand, and drops his money on the counter. He doesn’t even bother to wait for his change before walking out. He’s actually a few cents short, once it’s all counted out, but by that time the boy’s long gone.

Johnny knows he didn’t give the guy exact change, or even more than exact, because he didn’t have it. What little money he could scrounge up for his nightly freezie fix had been gotten out of his sofa and his mother’s change jar. Not that she’d miss it if she noticed.

He polishes off the freezie by the time he’s gotten back to the residential part of town. It is quiet this late at night, aside from all the insects. No cars travel these streets this late, and everyone is either asleep or reading quietly in their homes. The streetlights cast long shadows on the sidewalk, distorted by the six foot privacy fences that surround nearly every yard. He can see small pinpoints of light in the distance, a stray observing his journey home, or perhaps something more sinister waiting to leap forth from the shadows and snatch him off into the night.

Johnny laughs at the idea.

He hears the rustling of grass on the other side of the fence beside him and braces himself for the sharpness of a dog’s bark breaking his nighttime reprieve and deafening him temporarily. Who lets a dog out at this hour anyhow?

But instead of barking he hears a loud  _thump_  behind him, and a weight collides with his back shortly after. Johnny tumbles forward taking the weight down with him. After a bit of confusion and some harsh words he untangles himself from the person who has so unceremoniously fallen upon him.

“Son of a bitch,” Johnny hisses, rubbing his knee and thigh where it scraped against the cracked concrete of the sidewalk. “What the hell?” He looks up to see a small guy, not too much bigger than Johnny himself, pull his hood closer to his face and pick up a heavy-looking backpack. He’s just about to run when Johnny grabs hold of his arm and uses it to haul himself up.

“What the fuck is your problem?” His grip is firm on the guy, but the stranger proves stronger and just pulls Johnny along as he makes his way down the road, back the way Johnny had just come. “Hey!” Johnny’s voice is louder now, loud enough to draw attention to them had there been onlookers.

The guy jerks his arm, but can’t break free of Johnny’s grip. He turns to face him, light from a nearby streetlight not quite making it under his hood. Johnny squints, but all he can see is a dark shadow. The guy plants his feet and jerks his arm away again, but all he manages to accomplish is make Johnny bump into him. He makes a noise.

“What the  _fuck_  is your problem?” he asks again, his volume lowered now that he’s got this asshole’s attention. “You’ve got all this sidewalk to use and yet still manage to bump into me and then walk off like you’re some sort of privileged asshole that doesn’t need to apologize when he’s obviously as discourteous twat?” He gestures wildly with his free hand for emphasis. “Seriously?”

The guy tugs on his arm again and doesn’t respond.

“Jesus you act like you fucking robbed--” Johnny stops mid-sentence.  The rustling grass, the thud behind him before this twit hit him. He wasn’t bumped into, he was  _landed_ on “Holy shit, you  _did_  rob somebody. And here I was thinking you were just an asshole who couldn’t watch where he was--”

The guy pulls back his hood for a moment and Johnny’s anger dies in his throat. The guy’s looks like a real-life monster. His eyes are wide, bright, and colorless, and seem to stare at something  _behind_  him, rather than straight at him; they’re rimmed in what can only be called scorch marks, and don’t shut all the way when he blinks. His skin is pale and oddly textured, as if scarred over from some horrific incident that Johnny can’t even begin to imagine the details of. His mouth, however, is the most striking feature. Two thick gashes, straight, though a little lopsided favoring the left, run up from the corners of his mouth, giving him a perpetual smile. The muscles of his face tighten briefly and the smile widens to a grotesque proportion that makes Johnny take a step back, and tighten his grip. The stranger pulls the hood back over his face after a few moments.

Johnny doesn’t let go, and after a single breath says, “I don’t care how freaky you are, you can’t just go using kids as landing pads like you own the fucking place.”

There’s a pause. A mutual silence of understanding between them. Johnny realizes that freaky-guy isn’t going to apologize for his rudeness, but will instead resort to something more drastic to get free.

Johnny leans away in time to avoid the already bloody knife aimed for his face. He reaches a hand into his pocket and pulls out his own blade. It’s a small pocket knife, considerably less lethal than his opponent’s but still sharp. He takes a swing, tugging on the guy’s arm sharply to pull him into range. He misses pitifully. Freaky-guy swings again, this time going for the arm holding him in place. The blade doesn’t cut too deep but it’s enough to make Johnny yelp and retaliate. Dogs bark in the distance at the sudden sound.

His small knife has some trouble making contact with anything but the fabric of the guy’s sweatshirt, but Johnny manages to break skin once; sinking the short blade into the guy’s arm as he raises it to block the attack. It gets stuck there and Johnny is forced to let it go. He backs up trying to get out of the guy’s range, but he’s too slow and gets another cut to match the first, forcing him to let go. He stumbles backward, over the curb and into the street.

“Hey! What’re you kids doing?” It’s the voice of the neighborhood watchman. Freaky-guy nearly jumps out of his skin at the sudden sound. “Do you have any idea what time it is?”

Johnny, without really thinking, gets up, grabs freaky-guy’s arm again and pulls him along as he ducks out of sight of the watchman. Hopefully before--

“HEY! I know you! Your mother’s going to hear about this!”

Well shit.

He pulls the guy into a small patch of grass between two houses. He wrenches his knife from the guy’s arm and steps back into the light where the watchman can see him.

He’s a large man, over six feet tall and too heavy to be truly effective as a watchman, or a police officer. Johnny often wondered what he actually did in the law enforcement field since it obviously wasn’t hunting down criminals. He’s wearing little more than a bathrobe and sneakers, holding a flashlight. Johnny readies himself to bolt once he gets close enough, knowing this tub of lard won’t be able to keep up.

“Where’s your friend, kid?”

“What friend?”

He narrows his eyes at Johnny and shines the flashlight around, “You know damn well what friend you little pompous--” He gasps and lurches forward, falling face first on the pavement.

Freaky-guy steps on the watchman’s back, kneels down and viciously sinks his blade into the large man’s neck-fat. The watchman chokes out a few sounds, but Freaky-guy says something to him softly and stabs him a second time, and a third, and a fourth in the face for good measure. The watchman gurgles pitifully and twitches, and then lays still, black pool of blood forming around his wide-eyed, terrified face.

Freaky-guy stands, still with one foot on the body and looks at Johnny.

“Well, okay then,” Johnny laughs, “I was expecting you to just bolt and leave me to fend for myself like an asshole.”

The guy shrugs and laughs a bit, and for the first time he speaks, “I expected the same,” his voice is shallow and hoarse, and cracks more than once.

They laugh together for a moment. The two sounds melt together into a hellish abomination of noise and they stop abruptly. Freaky-guy steps down from his perch on the watchman, he pulls back his hood.  Johnny stares at his face again for a moment, the lighting is worse and the shadows cast on his face are nothing short of horrifying. He can feel a smile breaking out on his own face, and tries to shake it off.

“I’m Johnny,” he says in an attempt to distract himself from the mesmerizing shadows and shapes. This guy truly looks the part of a monster who has come to snatch children, eat them, and scamper off into the night.

Because that’s what child-eating monsters do.

They scamper.

Freaky-guy eyes Johnny for a minute, his eyes roll from one area to the next, never just passing in a straight line. “Jeff,” he says, nodding slightly. Jeff goes and picks his bag up from the patch of grass, twitches, and drops it. He presses a hand to his still-bleeding arm.

Johnny starts to feel his own injuries burn and throb painfully. He looks them over; not too deep, but still a mess. Blood is dripping down his arm to his hand, and is all over his shirt and is collecting in small puddles on the road.

The two look at each other.

“I’ve got some bandages at my place, I think…“ Johnny offers.

Jeff shakes his head, “I have a better idea. Hurry, before someone sees us,” Johnny starts to notice the faults in Jeff’s speech caused by the odd shape of his mouth. He is forced to speak slowly and even then it is difficult to understand some of the words. He ponders how difficult it must be to speak even as they come to the section of fence where Jeff first fell on him.

Jeff tosses the bag over the fence, and, with a bit of a running start, jumps and hauls himself into a sitting position on top of it. He holds out his good hand to Johnny.

Johnny gets a running start and jumps much like Jeff did, he grabs the top of the fence with one hand, but before he can even reach for Jeff, the older boy grabs him by the belt and hurls him over the fence and onto the grass below. He feels the air rush out of him as he lands. He gasps for air as Jeff hops down, retrieves his bag and heads toward the back door of a house Johnny is certain isn’t his home.

When Johnny gets his breath back, he rushes after Jeff, who is already in the house. He comes in and there’s a small collection of first aid supplies on the kitchen table. Johnny can smell blood, and something else he can’t recognize. It makes his heart pound loudly in his chest, whatever it is. He watches Jeff bandage his own wound before sitting down across from him and doing the same.

This guy, this  _kid_ , since judging by his height and the tone of his voice he could not have been much older than Johnny. Just killed a man. Without issue. He’d been more than ready to kill Johnny too, and God knows what he’d done in here. Who  _was_ this guy, and why did Johnny have so many damn questions he wanted to ask him, and…

“You’re staring.” Jeff’s brow line seemed lower, as though he were scowling. His voice had a lower tone to it, “ _What?”_

Johnny made a face and taped off the last of his bandages. He tried to answer but wasn’t sure what he could say that wouldn’t sound… inappropriate. He decided to look away and change the subject. “What’re we going to do about the watchman?”

“The fat guy?” Jeff makes a dismissive noise. At least, Johnny thinks it’s dismissive. “Leave him.”

Johnny raises an eyebrow. “Won’t… won’t we get caught?”

“ ‘We?’” Jeff laughs, “I was under the impression that I killed him.” Johnny tries to protest, “It’ll be fine. I can take care of myself.”

A shrug, “Suit yourself.” They make their way back to the street, which is much easier than getting inside the house. Johnny clears the fence on his own power this time.

Jeff slings his bag over his shoulder, and begins heading toward the dingy orange glow of the city. Johnny calls to him, “We should do this again sometime!” He means it as a joke, but when Jeff replies, “Alright. The park. Tuesday at midnight.” Johnny knows he’ll be there.

What he doesn’t quite know is why.


	3. 2: That Tuesday

CHAPTER TWO: That Tuesday

They meet at a bench in the western part of the park. Johnny is largely unfamiliar with this area, as it is more the hobo commune than an actual part of the park. The wooded areas are thicker here and cast more shadows giving those hobos that live in there more places to hide from the rent-a-cops who patrol the place at night. It’s eleven thirty and he feels silly for showing up so early.

Jeff appears in the distance. He walks right past Johnny, and gestures for him to follow. The boy hops down from the bench and falls into step behind him. They follow the winding path out of the park without saying a word to each other.

In fact, the first time they do speak is when they’re at the property line of a large duplex between the city limit and the outskirts of suburbia. Johnny’s seen the building before on his way to school. It’s ominous dark-brick façade and continuously shuttered windows made many people wonder who actually lived there, if anyone. The lights of the ground floor apartment are still on, those of the second floor are not.

Jeff points to one of the second floor windows. “We need to get in there,” he says and approaches the door.

Johnny stares at the window for a bit before rushing to catch up. Jeff holds the door to the foyer open for him and taps his foot impatiently. “What’re we doing here?” Johnny asks, only to get shushed.

At least he thinks it’s a “shush”.

They climb the dark stairs up to the door of the second story apartment. Jeff pulls a set of improvised lock picks, (really no more than bent hair pins, and straightened paper clips) out of a pocket on his jacket and sets to work at the door. He whispers to Johnny as he works. “Stay here. If you hear anything from that apartment, knock on the door once, then go somewhere. Old woman who lives there hears like a bat. She’s been a thorn in my side every time I come here.”

Johnny nods his understanding, “What’re you gonna do?”

The door clicks quietly and Jeff opens it, he gestures for Johnny to stay put, and slips inside.

Johnny sits in the silence of the stairwell for some time. He thinks for a few moments that he can hear the house sleeping. Hushed noises behind closed doors, someone talking in their sleep, or a conversation whispered behind a door so the child in the next room doesn’t wake. The steady almost static noise of breathing, soft and rhythmic mixing with the muffled chaos of insects and street noises outside. He can hear padded footsteps.

Then, so sudden and loud it leaves him shaking, he hears a scream. High pitched and broken, he thinks it to be a woman, or even a child. Johnny jumps and stares at the door, wondering if Jeff’s going to come running out and they can both abscond into the night.

Moments pass.

Nothing happens.

He hears a door open with a loud  _creak_  at the bottom of the stairwell. Over the railing he can see the silhouette of a hunched old woman with a cane making her way to the stairs. Johnny raps sharply on the door and ducks into the apartment. Nervous, he cracks the door and watches for the old woman.

A hand reaches over his shoulder, shuts, and locks the door. Johnny turns around to see Jeff, obviously agitated, his clothes disturbingly stained. Jeff grabs him by the arm and pulls him into the kitchen.

“What the fuck happened?” Johnny whispers harshly.

Jeff hisses at him, “Stay put.” He points to the floor for emphasis and then disappears beyond the kitchen doorway.

_Knock, knock, knock!_

Oh shit.

_Knock, knock._

“Hello? I heard noises! Is everyone alright in there?”

Oh shit, oh shit.

There’s a clang and the sound of a window opening in a back room.  

Mother fucker!

Johnny rifles through some of the drawers in the kitchen, but ultimately settles on a large knife from the block on the counter to be his weapon of retaliation. It slips from his hand when he hears a gurgling, strangled, “HELP!” from one of the bedrooms. It sounds like a woman’s voice.

Keys jingle and the front door’s lock rattles. Doors open and shut on either side of him. Johnny dives under the kitchen table.

The old woman calls out into the dark house, switching the lights on as she goes from room to room. She pauses briefly in the kitchen. Johnny takes a deep breath and moves from under the table.

The knife cuts into the old woman’s side like it was made of paper. She makes a strangled noise and falls to the ground in a heap, her head cracking against the linoleum of the kitchen floor. Her eyes glaze over and she convulses a few times. Johnny steps back to avoid getting splattered with the old woman’s blood. Something solid stops him from backing up too far. It takes hold of his arm when the woman stops seizing on the floor.

Jeff half drags, half leads Johnny to the back room where he’d heard the window opening and the loud clang. A metal utility shelf is awkwardly positioned and several of its objects are overturned. He pushes Johnny to the window. The backyard is mostly dirt and does little to break their fall from the second floor. They run from the yard and make it as far as the street corner before they hear sirens. They decide to split up and meet back at the park in an hour.

A little over an hour later, Johnny finds Jeff lounging on a bench; one arm flung over the back, the other over one of the arm rests, he only has one foot on the ground and it taps a slow beat. His bloodstained hoodie sits in a pile on the ground beside his bag. Johnny clears his throat a good distance away, not wanting to catch him by surprise. Jeff sits up at the noise.

They sit on the bench in silence for a few minutes. Johnny is the first to speak, “That…could’ve gone better.”

They laugh.

“Same time tomorrow?” He asks as Jeff collects his things. He is answered with a nod and a gruesome smile. Johnny stays on the bench for a while, after Jeff leaves. The events of the night now far enough behind him for reflection. Jeff had no doubt killed the residents of that apartment. Why? Johnny couldn’t be sure.  Then he thought of his role in the nights events.

He killed a person.

Not injured. Not scared.  _Killed._  One of the more terrible crimes a person could commit. If he was found out, there’d be some dire consequences to face. He should feel guilty, nervous, scared, saddened that he’d taken a life. But that isn’t the case.

He feels fantastic.

He can’t wait to do it again.


	4. 3: Several Weeks Later

CHAPTER THREE-- "Several Weeks Later"  
   
It doesn't take long for Jeff and Johnny to make a name for themselves. Headlines of local newspapers dub them the "South Laney Killer" yes, that's right, singular. They laugh quietly to themselves every time they see those large print letters on the newspaper vending machines on their way outside the park.  
   
Johnny doesn't learn very much about Jeff in the course of a few months. They only meet up once or twice every ten days or so and they're normally too occupied to share stories and banter, though they do occasionally make passing remarks to each other; Jeff's largely critical, Johnny's more personal. He isn't surprised that Jeff isn't very open about his life outside of homicide, but Johnny can't say he doesn't wonder.  
   
One night, on a particularly long walk back to their bench (it was  _their_ bench now and the hobos had learned to give it a healthy distance) Johnny's curiosity gets the better of him and he asks, "So...what do you do?"  
   
Jeff makes a questioning noise over his shoulder at him. He always walked at least two paces ahead of Johnny, whether it was because he didn't want to talk or simply because he was a head taller than Johnny was and thus had a longer stride, Johnny wasn't certain.  
   
He clarifies, "You know, in your down time. What do you do?"  
   
Jeff slows down a bit so they're walking abreast and considers the question. He watches Johnny out of the corner of his eye, then simply states, "I read," and says no more.  
   
Johnny accepts the answer with a nod, feeling like he may have crossed a line somewhere. He feels a little silly for being curious about Jeff's downtime in the first place. He decides not to ask any more questions.  
   
-=-=-  
   
The two partners begin to talk more after that, but less about life and more about strategy. They're running out of viable targets in the suburbs and the few places that  _are_  still viable are getting paranoid in response to all the news coverage.  
   
They spend the next week casing the three suburban neighborhoods that are within walking distance of their meeting place, including Johnny's own. Not meeting in the park, but at the city limit to exchange information on which homes still fit into Jeff's target criteria (which included, but was not limited to: no pets, no children under the age of five, and no alarms)  
   
At the end of the week they discover they have six houses; two in Johnny's neighborhood and four in another nearby. They assign the houses numbers and set up their next meeting ten days later.  
   
One: They still leave their doors unlocked. At least, the sliding glass door to the backyard and their six foot privacy fence is nothing to scale. You'd think people would've learned, but no, not that the two young killers are complaining. They can hit the house early since the parents are old enough to want to turn in early and the child is young enough to have no say in the matter. The only drawback was the parents slept in separate rooms; the mother at the far end of the hall in the master, the father in the guest room. Jeff is quick to assign Johnny to the wife as a target, and in the time it takes him to quietly dispatch her, and get more than a little clawed up in the process, Jeff is waiting in the hall, bloodstains up to his elbows, staining the rolled up sleeves of his white hoodie. Johnny wonders how Jeff is so quick or if he's just really that slow, and if the blood drying on his arms bothers him as much as it does Johnny.  
   
They hit house Two the same night and Johnny learns that no, dried blood doesn't bother Jeff in the slightest. In fact, he may actually enjoy the flaking blood of others on his hands and arms and the deep red stains in his shirt. It's kind of hard to tell.  
   
Jeff gives Johnny the oldest son from house Two, since he was a teenager and the only one that didn't share a bedroom with someone else. Johnny almost wakes the kid up and botches the whole thing, but recovers quickly when the kid thinks he's dreaming and just rolls over, oblivious. A pause, three stab wounds, a slash, and a large amount of blood later, Johnny's meeting Jeff in the hallway. They linger for a moment, listening, and when they decide there are no sounds of alarm they split up again, Johnny washing his hands in the sink, Jeff poking around for loose cash.  
   
"We're  _killing_ people, why not make a profit?" was Jeff's justification for it when Johnny first discovered he'd been adding robbery to their list of crimes.  
   
He comes back with a hundred and fifty and change, apparently the parents kept a sort of "rainy day cash fund" in their dresser. They split it in their normal fashion (80/20 favoring Jeff) on the way to the park.  
   
They coordinate next week's meeting as soon as they sit on the bench. They decide if they split the kills evenly, they should be able to hit three of the remaining houses if not all four. Jeff does most of the talking, but Johnny listens intently and nods in agreement when prompted, even though his mind is elsewhere.  
   
Although they've been going out, raiding houses, and leaving families little more than pulpy bloodstains fairly regularly, although Johnny has almost a dozen kills under his belt by now, he still gets, for lack of a better word--jittery. His heart thumps in his chest and his hands tremble for a while afterwards as he comes down from the adrenaline high. He tries to maintain his cool and keep his breathing from becoming fevered gasps, but most of the time he knows it's still visible and Jeff is silently judging him for it. This, just so happens, to be one such occasion.  
   
"You get over it," Jeff says suddenly, but with his normal deliberate slowness, if he felt the same jitteriness Johnny was feeling he was a lot better at hiding it, "eventually."  
   
Johnny cocks an eyebrow.  
   
"Oh, you'll still get a rush and a high," Jeff laughs in response to the eyebrow, "you'll just come down a little smoother. Took me a few months after my second to really get a handle on it. Takes practice."  
   
Johnny watches him, confused a bit by the openness. Was it some special occasion he didn't know about? Did Jeff have meds he finally remembered to take this morning?  
   
Jeff makes a noise and Johnny realizes he's been staring an awkwardly long time, a habit he'd broken quickly as he got used to Jeff's jarring appearance, but was apparently picking up again. "Sorry..." he says, but Jeff scoffs and waves him off.  
   
"You asked me a few weeks ago 'what I do'-"  
   
"and you said you read," Johnny finished, remembering. Jeff never seemed to mind Johnny finishing sentences for him, so long as he was right and Jeff didn't have to correct him. "Yeah? So?"  
   
"I'd like to ask you a similar question," it was more a warning than a request, "why do you stay?"  
   
Johnny cocks his eyebrow again, "You mean: why do I keep doin-"  
   
Jeff shakes his head and his teeth click a bit, something Johnny never stopped finding creepy, "why do you stay out? Here, at the park even after I'm long gone. Fond of the hobos?"  
 

"Oh god no," Johnny's response is a little more shrill than he would have liked. He clears his throat and contemplates how to answer--  
   
"There it is," Jeff attempts to say, but it comes out more as a strangely articulated thoughtful noise. When Johnny questions him, he scoffs again and says "you aren't as subtle as you think you are. You're really obvious actually. There's a story there, one you're not fond of sharing."  
   
Johnny stares for a minute, "and here I thought you just read books."  
   
"People are more challenging than books most of the time, but you...you're easy," Jeff smiles at him and Johnny shudders despite himself. His eyes wander lazily over Johnny, always avoiding direct eye contact, finally settling on something over his right shoulder. "You're not angry," he says, slow and clear, words falling together as he builds momentum in his assessment, "You're bitter. Jealous even. Your home life isn't what you want it to be, and you take it out on those who have what you want, but can't have. Normalcy? Love? One of the two, or both. Stop me if I get it right." he makes a thoughtful noise and adds, "you have a poor relationship with your parents. Absentee? Abusive? Ah...a little of both." he laughs, and stops talking.  
   
Johnny stares at him, uncomfortable with how accurate the assessment was. This was the most Jeff had spoken to him in their short time together, and it was reading him like some open, unattended large-print book. "How did you do that?" he says, then immediately regrets it knowing the question alone validated everything Jeff had said.  
   
"I told you: you're obvious."  
   
Johnny rocks back a little, suddenly defensive, and tries to change the subject, "What about you? Why do you do this?"  
   
Jeff stands and collects his stuff, getting ready to be out of the park before sunrise like he always was. Johnny is about to ask his question again, thinking Jeff is blowing him off when the older boy faces him and says, "few things in life are easy, but I enjoy the things that are." his grotesque, crooked smile twitches slightly, "they make it so easy I can't say no. And it's fun." Before Johnny can even form a response, Jeff turns on his heel and walks away.  
   
Johnny sits on the bench until he can see the sun beginning to rise through the trees and calls it a day. The morning joggers would be coming soon and they always look at him funny.  
   
-=-=-  
   
Johnny doesn't like to  _think_ about his home life, much less talk about it or have it read off his face like it's printed there for all the world to see. The short version is: his mother is crazy and his father doesn't exist. With no siblings, extended family, or friends he gets to deal with the brunt of his mother's crazy alone.  
   
The longer version is just plain ridiculous.  
   
He's discovered over the years that the easiest way to deal with his mother and her very special brand of crazy was to not be around. He spends his days at school, his afternoons at the library or whatever other  place they let kids pass the day for free while they waited for their families to get off work, his evenings were spent wandering around the city until the hobos give him looks, then at night he had Jeff or his freezie run. But he is still a kid and has to go home eventually, and when he does he always sneaks in through his “bedroom” window so he won't be detected by his mother or her voices.  
   
The sun is fully risen by the time Johnny gets home, not that he really cares that he was out all night. He plops down on the floor lifelessly and lays there, face pressed to the carpet enjoying the moments of silence. Ultimately, he opts out of school that day even if it meant spending a few hours listening to the madre argue with the voices. It's not like his school would call her to rat him out for skipping, and she probably wouldn't care if they did. He's in a sort of hazy state between sleep and wakefulness as he wonders if his school even knew he attended.  
   
Johnny wakes sometime after noon to a loud bang not too far from his door. He fights the momentary bubble of curiosity that rises in him to investigate the sound. It gets the better of him, however, and he listens intently to his mother's activities in the living room when he crosses the hall to the bathroom. All he gets are hushed whispers he can barely make out and intermittent obscenities for his efforts. Once back out in the hall he chooses to check and sneaks to the corner that connects the hallway to the kitchen and peers over the countertop and bar into the living room.  
   
She's sitting on the floor, legs crossed, back straight, facing the wall but not really looking at it. She's whispering quietly to herself. (The clamor Johnny heard earlier must have subsided. An agreement between the small woman and her boisterous headmates). Her short, wispy hair hangs in her face so Johnny can't really see her expression, only her lips moving in short, harsh notes and the nostrils of her sharp, avian nose flair anxiously. She bites her lip and hunches over, spindly limbs tangling together, ridges of her spine visible through the thin fabric of her dress. A few heartbeats pass before she straightens again, brushing all the hair from her face in one calm smooth motion. When her arm falls to her side Johnny sees her sunken eyes are dark and trained on him, brow furrowed harshly making the shadows even darker below her scowl.  
   
"Shit."  
   
He ducks behind the wall, but isn't quick enough. The woman possesses an agility and strength that shouldn't even be possible for someone her size, age, and mental status; she is on her feet and over the bar in seconds. Johnny jumps in surprise as she lands in front of him, trips over his feet, and falls flat on his ass. She looms over him, bloodshot eyes puzzled and wide.  
   
"Hello?" she tilts her head to the side like a curious animal, "I don't recall letting you in..." she pauses, listening, "or out."  
   
Johnny, despite his youth, knows better than to try and reason with her with the truth. He laughs cordially, "You did... But I've obviously overstayed my welcome...I'm just going to...go." he inches toward the front door, but she stops him with a raised hand.  
   
"Really?" she raises an eyebrow, head still tilted to the side. She leans in to get a better look at him. She smells of sawdust and ash. Johnny can see a pale scar marring the brown skin of her cheek that he is almost certain wasn't there last time he saw her this closely. Her eyes squint with the scrutiny, then, suddenly, her face relaxes. "No..." the corners of her mouth curl upwards, "I remember you."  
   
Johnny swallows hard and tries to back-pedal subtly, but she's quick and grabs him by the hair and pulls him close. "I know you..." she says again, slower, before making a loud "shushing" noise at something over her shoulder. Her grip on his hair tightens and he can feel the burning sting of strands being pulled loose.   
   
He has a plethora of scars from his mother. Johnny holds no illusions about his mother's feelings for him anymore because of them. At first, when he was very, very little he'd believed she was punishing him for some infraction, but over the years as it worsened, he discovered that wasn't the case-- at least not entirely. She  _was_  punishing him, but not for disobedience; for existing. He learned that she resented and despised his very existence in those nights where she'd shout at him and her voices in tandem, and that she wanted him to just be gone even though some part of her knew he had nowhere else to go. She'd always grow angry when she saw him now, instead of just annoyed, and that anger would become a violently screamed tirade against him that would end in him being thrown out on the yard, or worse, locked in the basement. After twelve years he's grown numb to the insults and yelling, the thrown objects and improvised weapons, the pitiful howling in the night.  
   
The one thing he hasn't grown numb to, however, is the fall down the basement stairs.  
   
Today's tussle leaves him lying sprawled on the dirt floor at the foot of those stairs; bruised and physically exhausted. He'd fought with her for hours, and was only mocked and beaten for his efforts. With time she overpowered him, backed him to the basement doorway, pushed him so he tumbled, and locked the door behind him.  
   
He coughs, dust bitter in the back of his throat, a few rogue strands of hair float from his face only to settle, itching, against his cheek. She's still screaming upstairs, one of her voices is defending him, he knows, and she hates it. There are muffled thuds and crashes as items are broken, toppled, or generally bumped into.  
   
Johnny finally rises after a time and dusts himself off, muscles sore and cramping from his stint on the floor and the spreading abrasions. He stretches, getting ready for the climb out of here, and his neck cramps painfully.   
   
There are only two ways out of the basement: the door to the rest of the house, and a small half-window at street-level. Johnny can see the orange glow of the streetlight as he struggles onto the grass. It takes him a full ten minutes, and he lays there, left foot still holding the window open, too worn out to move it until the street is dark enough to make the obtrusive glow necessary.  
   
It's still early, and he's got a few extra bucks, so he decides to hit the theater for the first time in over a year. Not the brightest choice he's made recently. Not that the movie was bad; though he really would like those three hours of his life back. The room is nearly empty but that teenage couple making out in the back is enough to make him want to stab himself in the ears just to get some peace.  
   
When it's over, he treks across town and crashes on his and Jeff's reserved bench for the night. And again the next night after he attempts to return home and can hear his mother's shouting from the street corner.  
   
She was having an impressively bad week.  
   
He tucks an arm under his head. He hates being homeless, though the park hobos treat him better than the city ones. A fact which probably has to do with his friendship with Jeff. He sighs, defeated, and feels the shadowy hand of exhaustion take hold.  
   
"What're you doing?"  
   
Johnny jolts awake at the sudden sound. He slips from the bench and falls hard on the concrete. He looks up to see Jeff leaning casually against the back of the bench, watching him. He's dressed differently; black jacket instead of the usual white, threadbare grey scarf draped around his neck. He repeats the question in the face of Johnny's puzzled stare.  
   
"Sleeping," he responds. Jeff cocks his head curiously. "What're  _you_ doing?"  
   
"Standing.  Do you always deflect questions defensively, or are you just having a bad day?" he pauses, "I mean, I'd be having a bad day too if I was sleeping on a park bench."  
   
"Bad few days, actually. Do you always lurk around parks like a stalker?"  
   
Jeff makes an unamused noise, but opts for a change of subject instead of a snarky comeback, "Patrol cars are hanging around our neighborhoods. We'll need to lay low for a couple of months."  
   
" _Months_?" Johnny's eyes widen. No.  
   
 _No, no, no, no, no._  
   
A few days, even a few weeks, he could manage. A few months without having something to keep him out at night? No. He takes a deep breath, unsteady. When he calms down, realizes Jeff is still watching him. "Months?" he asks again, deflated.  
   
Jeff clicks his teeth, "at least."  
   
Slowly, it hits him; that they just need to leave the neighborhoods alone, but the city is still theirs for the taking. That there are plenty of places to pillage and raid, parking garages with straggling employees, movie theaters and diners and convenience stores. All they need to do is set up shop there for a while.  
   
"You have an idea," Jeff observes.  
   
Johnny smiles, attempting in vain to match Jeff's lunatic grin, "You busy?"  
   
"Do I look busy?"  
   
A second passes and Johnny faintly wonders if he is. He's never seen Jeff outside of their normal meeting times, and even then he's not this put-together. Where had he been going, or better yet coming from, before he stumbled upon Johnny in the park? Did he have other friends?  
   
Wait, they were _friends_ now?  
   
Johnny shakes the thought. "I feel like waffles."  
   
Jeff makes a questioning noise, but follows when Johnny starts walking in the direction of a twenty-four hour waffle house he's been dying to put out of business.  
   
-=-=-  
   
It's a small place, a counter and a few booths, maybe seats thirty on a busy day. Not that the place is ever busy. It's one of the few places that is open twenty-four hours that isn't a chain; while being able to get waffles whenever you want is a pretty awesome business idea, the waffles have to actually be good in order for one to get business.  
   
There's no storefront window, which works in their favor; only a large sign that says "Porte's" and a chalkboard with the day's specials on it beside the door. The door itself, however, is glass partially covered with a health inspector grade of "B" which was more likely bought than earned. A small bell above the door jingles as they enter alerting the only waitress on staff to their presence.  
   
She's spindly, her face drawn and cracking in places. Wrinkles crease her brow and laugh lines punctuate her cheeks. Her frizzy, light hair and all its streaks of grey are pulled back in a loose bun. "Welcome to Porte's," she drawls from her position at the counter, "just sit anywhere." She takes a pen from behind her ear and sets it to a pad in front of her, "ya want anythin'?"  
   
Johnny glares at her and shakes his head. She scowls at him, shrugs, and disappears into the kitchen through a swinging door. The boys settle themselves into a corner booth.  
   
Johnny explains what he knows about the place. At this hour, the owner who's a bit of an insomniac, is the only one in the kitchen, and the waitress is his wife or girlfriend or something. He also takes the time to describe his favorite part of the place. "It's a giant waffle iron," he says, "it's designed to make sixteen at once or some shit. It's the pride of this place. Only thing it has going for it really."  
   
Jeff laughs, it's odd, muffled by the fabric of his scarf that he has pulled up to cover his mouth, "perhaps we should put it to better use, yeah?" he pauses when the waitress returns and sets a mug of coffee down in the center of the table.  
   
"Really?" Johnny snorts.  
   
Jeff waves him off. The waitress eyes him strangely as he pulls the mug to him. They stare at each other for a few moments before she shrugs and walks off. Jeff watches her go.  
   
They chat for a while, innocently passing time. Jeff nurses his coffee and absently loads it with enough sugar over the course of the conversation that it starts to thicken. Johnny clumsily twirls a fork between his fingers. They figure out how to take the place down, Jeff quietly dispatching the waitress when she comes to check on them, Johnny sneaking into the kitchen and putting the iron to better use.  
   
"So, why the bench?" Jeff asks when the plan is established and the conversation has wound down, "Parents lock you out?"  
   
"More like kicked me out," Johnny replies. Jeff perks up a bit. "It's nothing."  
   
Jeff tilts his head. As sign he doesn't believe that. "C'mon. What for? Stay out too late? Stab your little sister?"  
   
"I don't have a sister," he says quickly. "They just don't approve of me dating older men."  
   
For a split second; so short a period Johnny thinks he imagined it, Jeff's face darkens. He laughs, but there's little mirth in it, and he quips, "So  _that's_  why they locked you in the basement."  
   
The fork slips from Johnny's hand and clangs loudly on the table. The noise draws the attention of the waitress at the counter.  
   
Jeff tilts his head and chides, "Ooh. Sore spot?"  
   
Before Johnny can respond, the waitress returns, asking if they're okay. Her questions are just a muffled noise to him; he doesn't even hear Jeff respond. In fact, he doesn't really hear anything clearly until the waitress is leaning in front of him, one hand flat on the table, the other waving in front of his face. He looks at her, frustrated that she would intrude on them, picks his fork up from the table, and slams it, tines first, into the back of her bracing hand.  
   
Jeff, through some miracle of mutual insanity, was ready for this. He jumps up from his seat and wraps an arm around her, muffling the scream of pain and fear that erupts from her in the crook of his elbow. In the same motion, he pulls a small switchblade from his back pocket and clicks the blade into place. He hesitates a beat giving Johnny a chance to get up from his seat, and whispers something in the unfortunate woman's ear. Her eyes widen and she tries to struggle as Jeff plunges the thin blade into the exposed skin of her neck. She twitches and fights against him as he draws the blade out. The last Johnny sees of the struggle before slipping behind the kitchen door is the woman sliding from Jeff's grip to fall into a bloody, groaning heap on the floor, slowly trying to inch away across the bloody linoleum.  
   
The large, greasy man tending to the equally large industrial iron appears to have not heard a thing as Johnny sneaks around the prep counter and into the kitchen. The iron is an even more impressive piece of machinery in person. The cook is leaning under the lid, one hand holding the metal bar, the other scrubbing the grooves of the press. The whole thing seems impractical for its intended purpose, but for Johnny's it's perfect.  
   
He spots the temperature control, and sneaks up to it; knees bent, feet barely rising from the floor, making barely a whisper of sound, drowned out by the vigorous scrubbing of the cook. He clicks it on high, and takes a few steps back. It heats quickly for such a large piece of equipment.  
   
"The fuck?" the cook pulls back from the iron, skin reddened by the heat. He whirls around and jumps when he sees Johnny. "Who the hell are you?"  
   
"Just a concerned citizen," Johnny replies, taking a large knife from its place on the wall above the prep counter, "you know, the grade on your door is really misleading."  
   
"Ho?" the cook chuckles, "and just what do you plan to do about it?"  
   
"I plan to kill you," Johnny adjusts his grip on the knife, "no man should be allowed to violate the good name of the waffle."  
   
The cook chuckles again, but stops abruptly when Johnny's weapon pierces the fatty flesh of his gut.  
   
He growls in pain, and reaches for Johnny, who just ducks under his hands and stabs him in the side. "Oh, what? You didn't believe me?"  
   
The fat man makes another grab for the boy and catches him by the arm, grip bruisingly tight. Johnny struggles, losing his knife in the man's fleshy arm in an attempt to get loose. He takes a step back. "oh Hell--"  
   
Johnny has no idea when Jeff slipped into the kitchen, when he snuck up behind the cook, but as soon as Johnny stepped back, he got a running start, jumped and slammed into the cook's back, pitching them both forward and to the side. The cook lands face-first into the hot metal of the iron. Jeff grabs hold of the steel bar on the iron's lid to steady himself as the man tries to pull his soon-to-be melting face from the hot metal. Jeff slips anyway, jerkingly falls from his perch bringing the lid down with him. Johnny rushes up and holds the lid in place, muffling the screams of the dying waffle-man.  
   
When all is still and quiet in the kitchen, Jeff gets up from his spot on the floor. He holds his right hand up to inspect the red splotches and rapidly forming blisters on his palm and fingertips. He opens and closes it a few times and if he feels any pain at all Johnny can't tell. He does notice Jeff tear off a piece of his scarf, soak the cloth in water, and wrap it around his hand before they leave though.  
   
After that they are back out into the warm summer night. On their way back to the park they decide to give Jeff's hand a few weeks to heal properly before going out again; which may also give the patrol time to die down a little. Johnny offers to monitor the neighborhoods in the interim. He yawns and plops down on the bench when they arrive.  
   
Jeff pats him on the head with his uninjured hand. When Johnny scowls at him, the bright red corners of his mouth pull up into a grin, "go to sleep"  
   
Johnny bristles at the words. He shudders; feeling like someone dumped ice down the back of his shirt. Jeff leaves quietly and Johnny watches him until he's out of sight and the knot in Johnny's gut unties itself.


	5. 4: A Thursday

CHAPTER FOUR: A Thursday

“You know what we should do?”

It’s a simple question. Innocuous.

“No,” Jeff replies, absently flipping a lighter over in his hand. They’ve been sitting there on the park bench for hours. The police detail hasn’t let up and it left the boys bored and itching for a fight. “What?”

Johnny braces himself for teasing when he suggests, “We should go dancing.”

Jeff stops twirling the lighter and cranes his neck to look at the other boy sitting on the back of the bench, “What?” Johnny jumps at how loud Jeff’s question is, “No.”

He shifts uncomfortably on the back of the bench. It digs into his butt painfully and he’s forced to shift again. “Aw, c’mon” Jeff shoots him a weary look, “I hear they’re giving out free glo-sticks across town” his voice takes on a sing-song lilt as though that alone would persuade the older boy somehow.

Jeff says nothing, but quirks a brow curiously.

“Glo-sticks,” Johnny pushes, “For free.”

There’s a pause. They both hold their breath. Johnny waggles his eyebrows in, what he believes to be, a convincing manner; Jeff just holds his curious look. Finally, Jeff lets out a sigh. “Okay, fine. Let’s go.”

-=-=-

Who goes to a club on a Thursday?

Seriously?

When they arrive at the small place with the purple siding and the neon signs on the corner of Main Street and that creepy alley that no one ever wants to walk down regardless of whether or not there is daylight, the two boys find that there are fourteen people who go to a club on a Thursday.

They enter through the staff entrance, where the disc jockeys roll in their turn tables, speakers, and the other assorted tools of the trade. It places them right behind the working mix-master on a platform above the dance floor.

The music is horrendous. A techno melody that sounds more like someone beating a synthesizer with a baseball bat than any actual music with a constant  _thub thub thub_  bass beat underneath. Johnny can swear that he hears static mixed in, like the radio station playing the music isn’t coming in all the way.

_Thub thub thub._

The DJ doesn’t notice Jeff come up behind him, in fact he doesn’t even move until Jeff holds him still, clothed hand over the dark man’s mouth, small blade sinking in the soft spot between his ribs, and then coming up and cutting a wide smile across his neck. He sets the body down gingerly and shakes his head at Johnny when he tries to turn off the music, opting to use it as cover.

_Thub thub thub_.

They move out onto the dance floor together. Jeff grabs hold of a scantily clad woman’s glowing green bracelet and pops the clasp. She turns to him, offended and he stabs her in the throat. Johnny comes up behind a guy, knife sinking in between his shoulder blades. The man twists, shouting; his polyester shirt swishing with the movement. Johnny’s blade makes a brief but cozy home for itself in his chest cavity before he crumples to the ground, gasping.

_Thub thub thub._

They separate as people begin to notice what’s happening. Johnny reigns in a small Asian girl by her neon red necklace as she tries to run, tugging her backwards and onto his blade. A man feels heroic and tries to protect his crying girlfriend, his blood glows eerily in the dim light. The girlfriend chokes to death on her sobs when she joins him, bloodied, on the floor. Two girls try to run; he takes the head of one with some effort and the hand of the other. A large, grizzly type of woman tries to intercept him, punching her gloved fist against her palm in a way that would be threatening to someone who wasn’t holding a knife that could sever limbs with minimal effort. She goes down swinging at empty air.

_Thub thub thub._

He takes glowing trophies as they fall, but not after. He winds up with five. Two on his left wrist: green and blue. One on his right: purple. Two around his neck: red and yellow. He’s a rainbow and he doesn’t care. He strikes a cheesy pose at the end of a long slide through a still-slick puddle of blood. He hears the main entrance slam shut over the constant:

_Thub thub thub_.

Jeff is sitting at the bar when Johnny finds there is no one else struggling to stay alive. Eleven of the fourteen original occupants of the club are lying in varying stages of dead on the floor. He shoots a questioning look at the older boy, who only shrugs and raises a glass to him in a beckoning toast.

_Thub thub thub._

“Do we chase them?” he has to shout to be heard over the music. This is the first time anyone’s gotten away before. He isn’t sure what to make of it.

_Thub thub thub_.

Jeff just sips his drink seemingly unperturbed.

_Thub thub-_

The music stops rather abruptly, and with no DJ to replace it, the club descends into death scented silence.

“No,” Jeff says, calm, “No, we’ll be alright. The girl will bleed out; the guy is probably already dead.”

Johnny can’t stop himself, “That leaves one survivor.”

The scarred edges of Jeff’s mouth twitch, “Does it?”

Johnny nods slowly.

“Well then,” he remains calm and collected. Johnny doesn’t question it.

The two leave the club immediately. Sirens are blaring in the distance and fast approaching.

When they get to the bench Johnny stops to sit down but Jeff keeps walking.  “Go home,” is all he says over his shoulder before disappearing into the shadows.

-=-=-

A sliver of bright yellow light seeps in beneath the office door, casting a dim glow and tall, dark shadows throughout the room. The door is locked and barricaded with an empty filing cabinet. Johnny curls up in a dark space under the desk, using a nearby chair to block some of the errant streams of light. It’s been so long since he’s had a real bed or even a real bedroom, having to sleep on the office floor when he isn’t locked in the basement by his loony mother. He knows, however that this room and this set up is much, much safer in exchange for its lack of comfort.

He begins to drift, lulled by the soft noises of the house. It’s late and his mother has stopped shouting at her voices for the night. A peal of static-laced laughter comes from the television and interrupts the soft hum of the dishwasher in the kitchen. A creak of couch springs jerks him, briefly, into wakefulness, but when nothing follows he begins to drift again. The shadows in the room deepen, shapes becoming more indistinct, his breathing evens out.  He rolls onto his other side, shoulder and arm going numb under his weight. He thinks he can hear tapping behind him, but doesn’t think much of it as the world slowly slips away.

Johnny is roused sometime later, whether it’s a short or long time he isn’t certain, but his hand burns and tingles as he moves so it had to have more than a few minutes. Something blunt and rounded is nudging his back, right where his ribs meet his spine. It stops its prodding when he moves, rolling over with a groan and a stretch to see the source of the annoyance. He jumps, startled, banging his head sharply against the bottom of the desk. He feels a warmth spread from the wound and something in the back of his mind wonders if he’s bleeding, but the rest of his brain is too surprised to care.

Jeff is sitting in the desk chair, legs crossed, leaning back comfortably, his eyes scanning the room. His face shows no clear expression aside from the grotesquely joyful mask he wears all the time.

After some scrambling, sputtering, and bumping into things Johnny stands up; he quietly dashes to the door and presses an ear to it. He breathes a relieved sigh when he hears the shifting of a living person on the sofa. He isn’t quite sure why the noise calms him as much as it does, given that it means his mother is still alive to torment him.

“It’s quiet tonight,” Jeff says to get his attention as Johnny pulls away from the door, “I must say I’m surprised.”

Johnny doesn’t like the tone he was using; somewhere between hateful laughter and pity, it makes him feel nauseated. “What the fuck are you doing here?” he spits back. He then sputters a bit, trying to find more questions to bombard Jeff with only to discover he doesn’t really have any. He only succeeds hat making a series of frightened, confused, and angry noises before falling silent again.

“You’re lucky we didn’t get caught last night.”

“I’m-“

“You should know better by now than to let them get away.”

“What are you—“ Johnny begins to argue, but pauses, “The survivor.”

Jeff nods, standing, “Yeah. You’re lucky I managed to track the guy down before he could become a problem.”

“You make it sound like it was my fault.”

“It was,” Jeff states, his tone growing angrier as he goes on, “And I had no choice but to do damage control because of it. When you go to public places there are more likely to be survivors, or security cameras, or what have you.”

“You were there too!” Johnny argues.

“And I took out six,” Jeff responds, “Six moving, fighting targets. But that place was  _your_  idea; one would think you could handle the majority of its targets. Or at least count how many people were in there. Oh wait- You  _did_. That’s how we  _knew there was a survivor in the first place._  I didn’t know the number of occupants of the place until after you told me because I was too busy thinking of ways to keep the element of surprise, something you obviously don’t appreciate.”

“I-“ Jeff has never scolded him like this before.

It is terrifying.

“No,” Jeff raises a hand to silence him, his voice dropping to a harsh whisper, “no. What I saw last night was you feeding off of panic and fear. If that’s what you want to do, fine, but you won’t involve me in it anymore. You need to learn to check yourself before you get both of us caught. You’re becoming a liability to me. Don’t forget that if they see us together the one they’ll remember  _isn’t you._ ”

Johnny stands in stunned silence for a moment. He can’t really argue with it. He’d never taken into consideration that if a survivor went to the police Jeff would be the first one described, the first one hunted, and the first one caught. He was the one in the system; he probably had a birth certificate, a family, and probably spent time in the hospital when his face first went from zero to freaky. People probably knew his face, his name, his address. It’s probably the reason he opts for the stealth of breaking into a house and killing a sleeping family than a massacre on an open street. It’s why Jeff had needed convincing for the club and covered his face at the waffle house, why he had been so reluctant to go at first, even if he wound up enjoying the experience after the fact. Public places were risky for him. Infinitely more so than they were for Johnny.

He’d almost gotten his only friend caught with his careless revelry.

“I-“ He almost apologizes, but thinks better of it. Jeff probably wouldn’t accept the apology anyway, “No more crowds. I’ll be more careful.”

“You better,” Jeff responds, folding his arms across his chest. Johnny feels a chill roll down his back at the words. But his stance relaxes and he takes a few steps away, Johnny didn’t realize that Jeff had him pinned to the door until he has the space to move around again.

They stand in tense silence until something; a heavy something, with glass, topples over in the next room with a loud crash accompanied by a litany of shouted curses and threats. Jeff makes a thoughtful noise at the sound.

“Huh,” he says when Johnny glares at him, “I’m surprised she’s still around.”

“What do you mean?” He doesn’t need to ask. He knows exactly what that means.

Jeff says nothing.

“I’m not going to kill my mother,” He says with a tone he thinks is final.

Obviously it’s not, “Why? It’s not like she loves you, or provides for you.”

“She’s my mom,” Johnny says as though that is answer enough.

“She’s a raving lunatic that is only fueling your anger and reckless behavior,” Jeff argues back. “She locks you in the basement, comes at you with weapons, she doesn’t even think you exist. She thinks your some sort of evil construct sent by her headvoices to torment her or some garbage.”

Something about that strikes Johnny as odd. A pit opens up in his stomach and threatens to swallow him whole. “You’ve—“ His breath shakes, “You’ve been watching me- watching us.”

Jeff says nothing.

“How long?”

Jeff scoffs, “Long enough to know she thinks much less of you than you give her credit for.”

His heart flutters a bit. Jeff has been watching him. He probably knew more about Johnny and his mother than Johnny did, and he acted so nonchalant about it. He spied on him, and Johnny didn’t even know.

He felt something bubble up in him.

It wasn’t anger. It was too focused. Too dark.

It was betrayal.

When his senses return, Jeff is still standing there, unfazed, or at least appearing to be. Maybe he was a churning ball of emotion under that disfigured face. Johnny knows so little about him.

He swallows the emotion, “She’s sick.” Was all he could manage to say.

“She thinks you’re a monster.” Jeff corrects.

“Because she’s sick,” Johnny reasons. “She hasn’t always been this way. And who’s to say she won’t get better. I can’t kill her just because her sickness makes me- _her_ think I’m a monster. She’s my mom.”

He knows it sounds childish, but he’s on the defensive and doesn’t know how to argue the point. He’s a kid, he needs a mom. All kids need moms and dads, and since he’s lacking one he needs the other more than the average kid.

“I need her. Would you kill your parents if they got sick? If they didn’t recognize you any more through no fault of their own?”

Jeff backs towards the window, his obvious point of entry as he answers. “I did, and I would do it again.”

Johnny watched him duck out the window, too uncomfortable to speak.

“One of these days it’s going to be you or her,” he adds, undoing the catch on the window sill. Had the window been open this whole time? “Best make sure the odds are in your favor when that day comes.”

“And you speak from experience,” He hears the bitter words drip their venom from his mouth before he can stop them.

Jeff lets go of the window sill and lets it fall with a sharp  _crack_. The old panes crack around the edges with the impact. He turns on his heel and departs.

Johnny is left with silence and his thoughts for a while, feeling his age for the first time in the several weeks he’s known Jeff. He feels twelve. He feels like a little kid. He feels afraid of this soulless monster that has so flippantly danced into his life and offered him its secrets and guidance in things he never thought he’d be able to get away with.

He hears another static-laced peal of laughter in the silence. But it sounds close. At his shoulder, or inside his head.

And, just like that, the fear is gone. Replaced with rationalizations and childish denial. Jeff is the only friend he has, and so what if he’s been keeping tabs on Johnny? He’s got nothing to hide.

He’ll just need to be careful from now on.

Yeah, that’ll work.

He laughs quietly to himself, resolved in his plan. The room slips back into silence briefly.

_Bang!_

A sudden impact makes the door rattle and Johnny jumps with a yelp, crashing into the chair and tumbling to the floor.

_Bang! Bang!_

“I know you’re in there!” his mother’s voice screams hysterically from the other side “I can hear you breathing! Get out!” Her tirade continues for several minutes until she convinces herself he’s run off.

In those moments of her crazed shouting Johnny thinks it may be better for both of them if he put her out of her misery.


	6. 5: Christmas

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Tried to beta-read all the chapters before putting them up here. This is the only one that didn't get a read through, so there may be some errors...

CHAPTER FIVE: “Christmas”

\--

It’s a soft noise that wakes him. Soft and abnormal; not the typical stomping footsteps, hushed voices, or various appliances. It’s a whirring sound, like machinery. Just below him in the basement.

Sleepily, Johnny hunts for the source of the noise, trying to pinpoint its place in the basement based on what he can hear from the ground floor. He finds that the sound is consistent no matter where he is in the room. He wonders if he’s just hearing things, writes it off as nothing, and goes back to sleep under the desk.

-=-=-=-

Johnny turns thirteen halfway through fall, and has a bit of a growth spurt the first week of December, which Jeff finds nothing short of hilarious.

“I didn’t know you could grow up and not out,” he chides, handing him something. It’s a bundle of clothes, about two sizes too large. “They don’t fit me anymore,” Jeff adds when Johnny goes to hand the clothing back, “And it looks like you’ll need them more than I will.”

He’s right, and Johnny knows he’s right. A few more inches and none of the few articles he has will be able to hold together. Reluctant and not wanting to feel like a charity case, Johnny accepts the gift.

“Thanks.”

“Merry Christmas,” Jeff quips, “Oh, speaking of which. We’re gonna have to lay low for the holidays.”

Johnny isn’t surprised about this. They’d had to lay low during Thanksgiving and Black Friday as well. The influx of people making it harder to pick off targets with no witnesses or survivors, and the late-night parties made breaking into houses almost impossible. The two could pick off a straggler or two in the early mornings, but it wasn’t much, and, for Johnny, not nearly enough to settle him. He doesn’t say anything though, knowing his standing with Jeff is still tentative at best, and he doesn’t want to earn the older boy’s disfavor again.

He’d just gotten out of trouble.

Johnny realizes Jeff is staring at him. “What?”

“I asked you a question,” Jeff grumbles, “Maybe if you listened to the voices of people around you instead of just the ones in your head, we’d get more done.”

Johnny glares, “What did you ask?”

“Does anyone come check on your mother during the holidays?”

Johnny stares, confused.

“Your mother’s a psycho, one would think she’d get noticed after a while,” Jeff explains. “Does someone come see if she’d burned the house down? A family member or something?”

“Not that I know of.”

Jeff makes a thoughtful noise, and Johnny knows exactly what he’s thinking. He tries to sound firm, but his voice cracks about halfway through, “I am  _not_  killing her.”

The other boy laughs at him and Johnny, face hot, wants to stab him in the throat; right where the scarred whiteness of his face and jaw meet the tan, healthy skin of his collar. He pictures it: how easily the two incongruous pieces would separate.

It surprises him how satisfying the image is.

Jeff stops laughing and the whole world seems to go silent. Johnny really needs to figure out how he does that.

“C’mon, let’s-“

“What are  _you_  doing for Christmas?” Johnny also really needs to figure out how to control what he says. It’s like he doesn’t have a filter or something.

Jeff stops, blinks, and then resumes walking “Same thing I do every year. Sit in the attic while the Jamesons pretend I’m not there and collect a meager sum from the government every other week.”

The name is familiar and Johnny puts names to faces almost immediately, “Wait- Bill and Mindy?  _Those_  Jamesons? Don’t they already have two kids?”

Jeff chuckles as Johnny hurriedly catches up to him, soft bundle tucked under his arm, “Yeah, but they’re  _good Christians_ ,” a bright red line appears high on his cheek when he sneers in disgust at the term, already too-fragile skin made dry and paper-like by the cool air cracking with the expression, “so they take in wards of the state.” His voice gets low, “They think I’m some sort of demon. Lock me in the attic all the time I’m there so they don’t have to look at me. They've been trying to get me to go to church for years.” Fondness edges its way in, both in Jeff’s expression and tone, “I went. Once.”

“I’m sure that went over well,” Johnny prods him in the ribs with his free elbow.

“If crying babies, screaming mothers, flying bibles and really angry nuns is your definition of ‘well’ then, yes. It went very well indeed.”

They laugh all the way to the end of the street.

Part of Johnny still wants to stab him.

-=-=-=-=-

Jeff disappears into the shadows after another unsuccessful night hunting, and Johnny realizes this is the last time he’ll see his friend for the rest of the year. This also means that his only options for companionship for the next month or so are the few homeless people left in the park, and his mother.

Yeah, fuck that.

The walk home is a boring one, and Johnny wonders aimlessly until the sky turns that weird grey color it gets right before sunrise. It doesn’t seem natural to him though. It’s different somehow. He thinks he can hear something in the distance.

Screaming?

He isn’t sure, and his eyes burn from lack of sleep, so he shrugs and heads home. He can still hear the noise when he ducks in the window; in fact, he thinks it’s gotten louder. There’s a smell too, something acrid and heavy that sticks to the back of his throat.

It’s gone before he can pinpoint just what it is, or perhaps it isn’t gone and he’s just fallen asleep.

All he knows is that he wakes up to the front door slamming and his mother’s voice raving loudly on the front lawn. He peeks between the blinds, and sees her. She’s staggering down the street, hunched forward so far the knuckles of the hand that isn’t tugging painfully on her short locks of hair nearly scrape the ground. Her feet shuffle slowly away from the yard, and she’s muttering to herself expression alternating between fearful and angry at irregular intervals. Johnny watches her until she shuffles out of his line of sight.

Then he hears the noise again.

It’s a whirring sound, louder than it’s ever been, coming from somewhere beneath his feet. Johnny decides that now is as good a time as any to investigate since his mother is out of the house, and probably would be for some time.

He moves his makeshift barricade, unlocks the door, and steps into the hall. Johnny makes his way to the basement door, unlocks it, and flings it open.

But the noise doesn’t get louder.

He walks down the stairs, trying to follow the whirring sound, only to find when he reaches the bottom of the stairs a new sound joins in: a high pitched whine, like microphone feedback. He winces at first, but adjusts to the sound.

“Jeff,” he says to the dimly lit space of the basement, “I swear to God, if that’s you, I’m gonna rip your face off.”

The odor returns and the air grows warm and humid around him.

“The hell…”

The air becomes so thick and the stench so abhorrent that Johnny has to gulp air through his mouth just to prevent dizziness from setting in. He feels nauseous and his eyes water. He starts to cough and gag, wheezing against the denseness of the air. The whine and the whirring are almost deafening in a matter of a few coughs: one constant, and the other in bursts; like an old ventilator that is still working even though the patient has flat lined. He doesn’t realize that he’s screaming in pain from the noise until his throat closes up and he retches, falling to his knees on the dirty stone floor.

He looks up, and his vision is blurry, burning hot tears are reluctant to leave his eyes when he tries to clear them.

Johnny sees the wood on the wall crack, but doesn’t hear it.

He sees the monster’s maw open, shining white strings of saliva connecting the rows and rows of teeth across a deep red mouth, but doesn’t hear it roar, doesn’t smell its breath even when the strands of hair are blown from his brow.

He feels the monster’s hunger, its rage, its bloodlust, but all he can do is laugh in its face, his chest tightening as the air leaves his lungs but does not return, and slip away to teary-eyed blackness and near-silence.

-=-=-=-

Johnny wakes up so violently he slams his head against the bottom of the desk and sees stars. It’s around noon if the sounds drifting in from beyond the door and the amount of light pouring in the blinds is any indication.

He’s sweaty and shaking and freezing cold despite the unseasonably temperate environment.

It was a dream.

It was all a dream.

Johnny listens intently for a few moments and takes several deep breaths through his nose. No whirring, no whine, no smell. He breathes a sigh of relief and settles into his cubby trying to stop his limbs from doing that shaky, weightless thing that they do when his heart beats too fast. He shivers and feels light headed for several minutes.

When the world slows down and he feels normal again, Johnny crawls out from his tiny living space and stretches the last of the shakiness from his limbs, joints cracking in his elbows, neck, and back. He groans behind clinched teeth as the last bit of stretching strains his shoulder.

“God damn it.”

His clothes are damp and cling to him, irritating his skin as he moves. With a reluctant groan and more than a little time spent debating the logistics of getting his current clothing washed and dried before his mother notices him even though he knows that’s not going to work out before the debate even begins, Johnny unravels the bundle Jeff gave him by unfastening the belt that holds it together.

It’s not much. The top piece is a thin, dingy grey hooded shirt with long sleeves that are frayed at the wrists and worn almost to tearing at the elbows. There are two short sleeved shirts: one solid black faded at the underarms and collar, the other a dark red with more than a few holes. Last, two pairs of jeans Johnny knows will not fit him without the belt that was so thoughtfully supplied; both are dark, faded and torn at the hems and knees, the denim is soft to the touch from years of wear. The whole bundle smells of dust and moth balls, and there’s lint stuck to the dark fabrics.

He changes quickly into the dusty second-hand goods, leaving the remaining shirt and jeans in a neatly folded stack under the desk. He gathers his own clothing, and presses his ear to the door.

The house is still.

He nudges the door open, and quickly shuts it again.

The file cabinet he uses to block the door is standing straight just beside the door jamb and the door is unlocked.

He feels ill.

Johnny quickly ducks out into the hallway and presses his back to the door; he eyes the latches on the basement entrance out of the corner of his eye. They’re still locked. At least, he hopes it’s ‘still’.

Crouching below the counter, he trudges through the kitchen and into the small alcove that houses their washer/dryer setup. He tosses his clothes, along with a few towels from a nearby hamper inside and starts the cycle. Creeping back through the kitchen is a little more difficult. The sound of the washer causes his mother to stir, grumbling into the empty space of the living room and questioning the newest holes in the wall. He has to bolt to make it to the hallway before she notices his presence, and even then he doesn’t quite make it.

“What the?”

The whirring starts up again, steady and in time with his breaths. He can feel the blood rushing in his chest and neck.

His heart stops when he tries to shut the door and it doesn’t close behind him.

_“You…”_

She grabs him by the hood of his long sleeved shirt and pulls him past her and into the hallway. His back slams hard into the wall, he’s pretty sure he hit a stud, and dislodges a few framed pictures from their places; they thud against the carpet, but don’t break.

Johnny pushes off from the wall and tries to bolt, but she grabs him by the hood and throws him again. He hears crunching when he lands and feels sharp stabbing and warmth under his hands as he rises.

His eyes never leave his mother.

She’s pale, paler than is usual for her. Her dark eyes are wide and fearful under her scowling brow, they shimmer a bit and redness inches its way across her corneas. A choked sob causes disjointed pauses when she starts screaming obscenities at him.

“Enough!”

She stops screaming, the whirring and whine quiets a bit, so only harsh breathing remains.

“Enough,” Johnny says again, hoping it will bring silence. It doesn’t.

His mother hisses through cracked and yellowing teeth. “You… you son of a bitch.” She is trembling with rage. “You son of a bitch. You did this to me.”

“What the fuck are you—“ She lunges at him, and he manages to grab her by the wrists, holding her firmly in place. Johnny can’t tell if she’s just off today, or if the practice he’s been getting is paying off. Perhaps a little of both. “What the fuck are you going on about?”

The woman shrieks in his face and struggles against him, tears in her eyes. She drags him across the glass shards and onto the matted carpet before giving up on getting free and screaming at him again until it dissolves into a laugh. “They said you’d come back for me. They said, but I wouldn’t listen.” She repeats the phrase over and over, “They said, but I wouldn’t listen.”

“Who said-“

“It wasn’t bad enough was it?!” She shouts, drops of spittle hitting him square in the face cause his grip to tighten involuntarily, the wisp of a woman laughs, “Of course not. It’s never enough. It’s bad enough I have to see your goddamn face every day.” She makes a low, feral noise. “What else do you want to take from me?”

Johnny feels his grip slipping.

Maybe it would be best to end her.

No.

 _No_.

“I haven’t taken anything from you!” he screams back at her. His screaming gains momentum as she shrinks away. “I’ve never taken a goddamn thing! I walk on eggshells for you, you fucking psycho!”

She just shrieks and struggles to get away. “You sent that little hellion after me. To-to watch me until you thought I’d had enough time- That fucking hallucination. It was you. IT WAS ALWAYS YOU. YOU GODDAMN MONSTER.”

Johnny grits his teeth, “I’ve never done anything to you! I’ve never SPOKEN TO YOU and all you do is lock me in the basement! I don’t deserve this! You’re my—“

The woman wrenches her wrist free and latches on, digging her cracked and filthy nails into the back of his head and neck, and pressing her full weight into bringing him down to the floor, all the while screaming:

“Rapist!”

Something inside Johnny snaps at the word and what it implies. What it means. What it explains.

He grabs a fistful of her hair and tugs as hard as he can to get her screaming face away from him. His grip slips as strands come loose and he can feel the tacky wetness of blood and the burn of tearing skin behind his ear. He shifts, bending a knee to put even more distance between him and the raging female before planting his only free limb, his right foot, against her stomach, releasing her wrist and kicking out as hard as he can.

Her nails slash his face and a strands of hair fall between the fingers of his still clenched fist. He scrambles to his feet as she picks up a frame and throws it at him.

He stumbles, and she catches up to him using her momentum to slam them both into the wall. Blindly, he swings his elbow back, turns, and throws a punch; only the elbow connects and she still has hold of him when they reach the basement door.

The noise is deafening.

Johnny loses a few moments to the noise.

When his wits return, he’s grappling with his mother, leaning precariously at the top of the staircase. The wood creaks, and that putrid smell wafts up in warm drafts at his back.

Johnny wraps his arm around her when she shoves him, but loses his balance anyway and they both tumble down the stairs.

Well, she tumbles down the stairs; Johnny actually hits the tenth step from the bottom hard enough to go through it instead of bouncing off it. Somewhere in the fall there is a gush of blood, a harsh crack he can barely hear over the sounds of machinery wracking his brain to the point of physical pain. Everything goes black around motes of dust and splinters kicked up from the floor by his breath.

“Fuck-“ He groans, pushing up on his elbows. “Fuck…ow…” He looks at the hole in the staircase and the shards of wood collected around him. There’s a small puddle of blood on the floor, bright red still streams from his nose and widens the diameter. Johnny stares at the puddle, transfixed. He can’t think through the ringing in his ears and the throbbing pain in his…everything.

Until a kick to the ribs knocks the wind out of him. He curls defensively on his side, coughing wetly between gasps for air.

The barrage stops after a few kicks, and he looks up to see his mother, arm bent at a grotesquely awkward angle dangling at her side and her head cocked toward a shard of bone sticking out of the once defined line of her clavicle. Bright blood gushes from her wounds. Her skin looks grey and she wobbles. Her eyes don’t focus on him, but on a spot on the floor next to him, wide and crazy as ever.

He retaliates, hooking a leg around her ankle and pulling backward with enough force to throw off her balance and send her tumbling to the floor with a wet thud. She shrieks, cries, and occasionally laughs, struggling to get up and failing.

Johnny rises, numbness taking the place of the pulsing bruises, and pins her to the floor digging his bony knees into her upper arms. She curses at him, struggling against his weight and her own blood loss, and he just stares at her. He plants one hand on the floor on either side of her head and stares at her. She screams, spits at him, and howls when his blood drips on her face, and he stares at her.

Her dark skin, thin bony form, graying hair. The cracks in her teeth and swelling around her eyes. The blood collecting around her ears. The bloodied shard of bone sticking out of her heaving ribcage of a chest.

This is what he’d been so afraid of.

This…whelp?

She was so frail. Little more than a twig.

He feels his jaw moving, forming words, the vibrations in his throat that are so commonly associated with speech it’s almost alarming when he can’t hear the syllables. Almost. She stops screaming and watches him, appearing to listen intently.

The whirring and the whine return, the breathing and the flat line.

He’s screaming now, but can’t hear the words.

She looks terrified.

For a moment, he’s outside of his body. Completely out of control. His hand grabs hold of the projection of bone and twists.

Her face contorts in agony.

Johnny takes hold of what’s left of his mother’s hair, digging his fingernails into her scalp. He pulls her face to his.

“I am your son.” He feels the words, but doesn’t hear them.

With every ounce of strength he can muster, he strikes her head against the solid floor, and uses the force to push himself to his feet. He presses a booted foot to her cheek.

“You were supposed to care.” His voice cracks as he stomps down, using what little body mass he has to generate enough force to ensure that a second stop isn’t necessary.

Her body deflates.

He stomps again anyway. “You fucking bitch!” Screaming at her, he stomps down again and again “You were supposed to care!” until he loses his balance and falls, planting his hands in the gory pulp that was once his mother’s face and head. Johnny’s up to his wrists in the stuff. “I’m your son.”

“I needed you.”

He takes a few heaving breaths, coughing drops of blood in between.

The damn noise just won’t stop.

“Shut up.”

It only gets louder.

Johnny looks over his shoulder at the wall. He can see cracks in the wood, but no monster maw. “Shut up!” he shouts.

It’s inside his head. Like his brain is throbbing in rebellion against the sound. He retches. “Shut up!”

On blind anger he rises to his feet and rushes to the wall, pounding his bloodied fists against the cracked wall as his tired body slowly sinks to the floor.

“Shut up.”

“Shut up!”

“SHUT UP!”

The sound begins to fade, so does the pain and weakness in his limbs, and the world around him. The last thing he feels is the wood against his face, and a gentle pulsing behind it. Like the heartbeat of a living tree come to take him away from the waking world and its horrors.

Sleep comes quickly.

-=-=-=-

A cold circle presses against his cheek and Johnny sputters awake, falling off the park bench and crashing to the sidewalk. A jolt of pain shoots up his back.

“The fuck!?” He shouts, rubbing the pain away.

Jeff cackles, and offers Johnny the offending cold thing. It’s a freezy; he’d recognize that red slush anywhere. Jeff has a steaming foam cup in his other hand and uses it to muffle his cackling just a bit.

Johnny snatches the beverage and downs it in huge gulps. He presses his tongue to the roof of his mouth to prevent brain freeze with minimal success and winces. Jeff begins full on laughing at him, and Johnny hurls the half-empty cup at him in anger. Jeff dodges the projectile just barely and Johnny immediately regrets the action.

Johnny collapses on the bench, another jolt of pain surging along his spine when it hits the wood and steel backing of the seat. He groans loudly.

“What happened to you?” Jeff asks, coming around to face him. He stands directly in front of Johnny, head tilted to one side.

Johnny covers his face with his hands.

Wait-

“What day is it?”

Jeff tilts his head further, “What?”

“What day is it?”

Jeff thinks for a moment, “The tenth.”

“Of December…”

“January,” Jeff corrects. “Why?”

Johnny doesn’t say anything, and covers his face with his hands again.

“You seem to be holding up well,” Jeff says after a few moments of silence.

Johnny makes a questioning noise.

“For someone so adamant about not killing his family, you’ve been coping well with the whole ‘killing your mother on Christmas’ thing.”

“That was on—“ He doesn’t even want to think about this whole mess anymore.  He’s losing time now. Large chunks of it.

He retches loudly. Jeff takes a step back. “Jesus Christ, man. What’s wrong?”

Johnny coughs and sputters, staring at the concrete and trying in vain to swallow the burning in his throat.

“Ha ha ha ha.”

Johnny glares up at Jeff, but he isn’t the one laughing.

“Try again…”

Jeff stares at him hard. “Is something wrong? You seem sick.” He takes another step back, “So help me if you are contagious.”

“I’m not-“ He rubs a hand across his face, “I’m fine. I just… I don’t know what to do next.”

Jeff steps closer, “What do you mean?”

“I can’t go home. I can’t sleep on this bench forever…”

“Hmm.” Jeff sips his coffee thoughtfully.

“I’m not in the system.”

This is a shot in the dark. He doesn’t think it’ll take. “Do you think… the Jamesons’ll take me? I have nowhere else to go-“

“No.” Jeff says firmly.

“What? But I-“

Jeff sighs, “The Jamesons can’t take you in because they’re dead.” Johnny opens his mouth to question, but he cuts him off, “The legal work went through so I could get my trust fund. I didn’t need them anymore, but they wanted to keep me anyway. They’re dead.”

Johnny groans, defeated…But, if his foster family was dead, and he had access to trust fund money. Jeff probably had his own place.

“Can I stay with you?”

There is a tense silence that settles between them. Jeff stares at him through the steam rising from his coffee, the Styrofoam cup obstructing his face. His brow furrows, dark ashen lids nearly close, then open again. Johnny realizes he’s shaking under the intensity of the stare masked by steam.

The world is still and quiet, as if it too is awaiting Jeff’s decision.

Johnny has to figure out how he does that.

-=-=-=


	7. 6: A New Environment

 

Jeff rents the second floor apartment of a dirty red brick building not five minutes’ walk from their normal meeting place in the park. It’s off the main road, down an alley and around a few turns and every time they round a corner Johnny can tell that their surroundings were getting worse. It is a far cry from the suburbs.

The building itself is not much to look at; rust-colored bricks cracking and dingy with age, shadowed by the buildings that surround it. Uniform bars cover the grimy windows like some sort of prison cell block for the lower class innocents. The metal door is startlingly new compared to all the other dumpster-scented adornments, its numerous locks are shining brass in the dim light and Jeff has to dig out three keys to open them.

Inside the building, things are not much better; tiles are cracked on the floor and some of the ceiling panels are loose, threatening to drop on their heads and cause injury. Two doors line the bottom floor and Jeff explains that one is to the laundry room, and the other is the landlady’s apartment. The doors are identical and he refuses to tell Johnny which is which as he leads the younger boy up the rusting, creaky stairs. He also explains that one of the two apartments above his are empty, but, again, refuses to say which one.

Jeff’s apartment is small. Well, tiny, would be a more appropriate word. It is barely large enough for one young man to live comfortably, much less two and Johnny is truly surprised that Jeff is willing to share the cramped space. He is also surprised by how well furnished the place is; though there aren’t any matching pieces or really nice furnishings, Jeff has all the comforts of home, most of them lifted from yard sales or junkyards or Ikea in the small hours of the night.

And then there’s the books. There are dozens, if not hundreds of the little paper blocks scattered about the apartment and lining a wall of shelves that rested where Johnny believed a TV would have gone if he thought for a second that Jeff watched television with any sort of regularity. Johnny tries to ask if he can read some of them, but his question dies in his throat as he tries to figure out where to start.

Jeff clears his throat and glares at him impatiently as if the amount of awe Johnny is showing toward the new living space is entirely uncalled for and he should just get a grip, but Johnny finds his eye drawn to the few pieces of abstract art hanging from the walls and can’t help but to think about killing Jeff just to take his apartment. The older boy scowls at him, “I wouldn’t even think about it if I were you,” he warns, as if reading Johnny’s thoughts.

Johnny needs to work on how easy he is to read.

“You can sleep out here,” Jeff says now that he knows he has Johnny’s attention. He gestures curtly to a pair of beanbag chairs and a low-lying coffee table that marked his living room. Johnny nods. “And yes,” Jeff continues with a roll of his eyes, “you may read my books, but if I catch you dog-earring a page or folding a cover God himself won’t be able to save you.”

Johnny nods again, knowing the threat will hold true.

“I don’t know where to start,” he laughs after several minutes of filing through the bookshelves after both of them had settled in. Jeff doesn’t respond at first, opting to treat Johnny more like furniture than a guest or a roommate, so Johnny bumps up his statement with a question, “What do  you recommend?”

“Kafka’s pretty easy to swallow,” Jeff shrugs, “depends on what you want to read, really. I’ve got a little of everything.”

It was true. Johnny is sure Jeff could run a bookstore out of his apartment and make no small amount of money, and yet he doesn’t.

“Ever consider selling your books?” Johnny asks, scanning the titles for this ‘Kafka’ thing, “upgrading to technology?”

“Staring into light gives me headaches,” Jeff snorts, “sensitive eyes and all.” He rounds the short counter separating the kitchenette from the rest of the apartment and pulls down a thin book bound in fake leather dyed a dark blue. The words “Metamorphosis” and “Franz Kafka” are emblazed in gold on the front along with a tiny cockroach, and they shimmer at Johnny enticingly as Jeff holds it out to him. “Here. Knock yourself out.”

Johnny settles in to read, and Jeff returns to treating him like furniture. Occasionally, Johnny will peek over the cover of his book and try to assess what Jeff is doing, a desperate attempt to read the other as well as Jeff reads him, but finds that every time he looks Jeff isn’t doing much of anything. A chore here or there or shelving some of the loose books, sometimes Jeff will disappear behind an opaque paper partition that separates what is probably a bedroom from the rest of the space or behind the bathroom door. He never says anything and makes very little noise the whole time. In fact, once Johnny is about halfway through _Metamorphosis_ he’s forgotten Jeff is there and nearly jumps out of his skin when the older boy suddenly appears beside him.

“Let’s go.”

-=-=-=-=-

They only hit one house that night, but it’s in a nice part of town; a part that normally has security systems, motion sensor lights, and nosey neighbors. Johnny wonders just how long Jeff has been scouting the place when they slip into the backyard under cover of darkness.

The kids go first. Three of them, between the ages of nine and fourteen. Then the parents; Jeff takes the mother, Johnny the father. His stomach knots when he hears Jeff whisper “go to sleep” when the woman wakes up to a hand over her mouth and her husband bleeding to death beside her.

The whole house is cleared in ten minutes. Or so they think, until the sound of movement from the living room sends them both sprawling under the bed for cover.

“What the hell?” Johnny hisses, hand tense around the knife leaving streaks of blood on the plush, cream-colored carpet.

Jeff is silent for several moments. “All the beds are accounted for.” He crawls out from under the bed and moves to the door like a shadow, peering out into the hallway.

He shakes his head, “Looks like we weren’t the only ones with designs on this place.”

Johnny rushes up to meet him, making significantly more noise and receiving a harsh smack to the back of the head in punishment.

A vase breaks in the living room, and the whole house falls silent.

Several tense seconds pass.

Then minutes.

Johnny can hear himself breathing and wonders if it’s as loud as he thinks it is. He casts a nervous glance to Jeff who is just staring out into the hallway with a focus that could light something on fire had he been gifted with heat-vision. The younger boy can feel his blood run cold.

“Let’s go.”

Johnny looks at his partner in crime fully, “No, let’s take them too. They’re burglars, no one will miss them.”

“No. We shouldn’t risk it.”

There is a loud shushing down the hall. Footsteps approach.

“Shit,” Jeff grabs Johnny roughly by the shoulder and tosses him in the closet. He disappears before Johnny can turn around.

“Fucking bastard,” Johnny breathes drawing the door closed, but leaving a crack large enough that he can see into the rest of the room.

Two men dressed in all black walk in shortly after he shuts the door. Johnny rolls his eyes. All black? Are you serious? They probably have ski masks stashed in their pockets too for fuck’s sake. They seem nervous, glancing around and sniffing the air. They smell the metallic odor of blood Johnny’s nose has become immune to, but cannot see the bodies yet in the darkness. Johnny can tell that as soon as they do, they will run.

There is apparently a third member of their group, and Johnny can hear him screaming in terror just before the others reach the bed. The other two bolt to help their companion and Johnny seizes the opportunity praying it’s Jeff the guy outside is screaming at and not some lose dog or other such nonsense. He breaks out right behind them, pulling down the trailing member of the pair right as the man enters the hallway.

The carpet muffles the _whump_ of his fall and the knife in his throat stops him from screaming.

And Johnny feels justice along with blood on his hands.

Something inside him, something hungry and feral, demands more and before the guy is even dead at his feet Johnny chases after his companion. It roars, the savage beast, and Johnny has to fight the urge to roar with it when he finally gets close enough to strike.

This takedown is not so silent.

All of Johnny’s tiny frame plows into the grown man sending them both toppling over into the glass coffee table with enough force to leave them covered in sparkling dust and surrounded by shards. The first stab is with Johnny’s knife, but the blade gets stuck and he winds up using rogue pieces of glass to finish the job. He’s still stabbing the guy when Jeff appears in the doorway.

He doesn’t want to stop.

And Jeff is right next to him now, demanding in a quiet, firm voice that they leave.

Johnny doesn’t listen.

There is a knife at his throat.

Everything is still.

Slowly the boy comes back to himself. The static in his ears recedes, his vision clears. The hunger dies. He just sits there; breathing slowly and feeling the hot blood begin to cool in the frigid January air. It is only then that Johnny realizes the front door is still open. He feels the razor edge of Jeff’s blade scrape at the skin of his throat, dangerous, and the younger brings his hands up plaintively.

“I forgot myself,” he whispers, staring at the bloody mass before him.

The blade digs deeper and the boy can feel his skin pull tight beneath it. “I cannot afford to tolerate disobedience.” Jeff’s unnatural voice growls in his ear, “I thought I was clear on that point.”

“You were,” Johnny replies, afraid to nod.

His skin splits beneath the blade regardless, a burning sting, but Jeff doesn’t cut deep. “Do you hear that?”

Johnny winces, “Sirens,” he sighs hearing their high-pitched whine rapidly approaching.

“We should have been gone ten minutes go. Move it.”

And Jeff is gone. Johnny has to rise quickly to fall into step behind him; he can feel the warmth of flowing blood staining his shirt collar as they dive out the bedroom window and dash back into the city, narrowly avoiding the prying eyes of neighbors and the occasional vicious guard dog.

When they reach the denser collection of buildings that mark the transition from suburb to city, they stop in a dark alley and exchange bloody sweatshirts for something less horrific and obvious. The walk back to the apartment is a quiet one.

-=-=-=-=-=-

“You pull that shit again, I will kill you,” Jeff says, hurling his backpack across the apartment as soon as Johnny locks the door. “I am sick of scraping capture because you cannot keep your head together.”

“My head is fine,” Johnny argues back, only to regret it immediately.

“I wanted to leave. You argued with me.”

“And you threw me in a closet,” his voice is shriller than he would like it to be. “They’re dead, they can’t report us anyway.”

“Doesn’t change the fact that I can’t take you anywhere,” Jeff growls, turning his back on Johnny and the conversation.

He wants to stick his blade right between the older boy’s shoulder blades. He feels sick to his stomach, and the static buzzing returns. “That isn’t true,” he shoots back, trying to drown out the noise.

Jeff glares at him over his shoulder, “You have yet to prove me wrong.”

“That isn’t fair. This was a fluke-“

“A fluke handled poorly,” Jeff sighs, “We leave next time.”

Johnny wants to say there won’t be a next time, but just settles on agreement knowing that trying to argue may end with him getting another dagger to the throat. Absently, he raises his hand to his neck and prods the cut; it’s scabbed over, but tender. It’ll take a day or two to heal.

Jeff disappears behind the paper partition and tells Johnny to go to sleep, tightening the knot in his stomach. In the dim light the younger boy can see his roommate’s silhouette collapse heavily onto his oversized futon, shift a bit, and then lie still.

He sighs and plops himself into one of the beanbag chairs. It takes some shifting, but he finally finds a position comfortable enough to sleep in. The quiet in the apartment allows him to drift off much more quickly than he ever could at home with his mother screaming and slamming things.

-=-=-=-=-=-

The static in his ears is deafening when Johnny’s mind jerks violently to wakefulness. He feels a chill settle around him, so cold in makes his hands ache and his teeth chatter. His hold body shivers. When he finally gets a hold on himself, he opens his eyes.

He sees Jeff leaning over him, black hair blending in with the shadowed ceiling, but his pale face catches the light and Johnny can see every detail impossibly clear. The freakish teenager is wide eyed and staring, torn mouth pulled impossibly wide and showing bloodied teeth as he stands, bent at the waist just letting the flowing blood drip. His tongue clicks behind is teeth and his head tilts curiously, but disturbingly slow with the motion. Johnny can hear the vertebrae in his neck pop. The whole thing couldn’t have taken more than a couple of seconds, but it feels like hours before Johnny can snap his eyes shut and scramble away.

He pulls a knife out of his boot and swings it behind him as he falls to his knees in an attempt to get away. The blade cuts only air.

Carefully, Johnny opens his eyes expecting to see Jeff still in place, staring at him.

He sees nothing.

Sweating and shaken, Johnny rises to his feet. His eyes scan the living area looking for anything out of place. Eventually his eyes settle on the partition.

Jeff’s silhouette is still there.

His nerves leave him shaking as he goes to make doubly sure, but Jeff is sound asleep, his head tucked protectively under a pillow, shielded from the pale grey of pre-dawn light pouring in the dingy window at his bedside.

Johnny stumbles back to his hair and sits back down, staring into the shadows.

He only stops shaking once sunlight has filled the room completely.


	8. 7: Adjustment Period

The nightmares persist even after Johnny more or less becomes a fixture in Jeff’s crappy apartment. They aren’t always of his roommate, however. Sometimes Johnny dreams of his mother throwing him into the basement. Sometimes they’re of some strange, twisted, garishly painted figures looming over him and pulling him in two directions. Other times they’re of broken floorboards and monsters Johnny finally found mimicked in reality when he picked up a book with “H.P. Lovecraft” under the title.

No matter where he sleeps or what alterations he makes to his routine, Johnny finds no relief to these nightmares. Eventually, he gives up on sleep altogether and settles for the dim light of Jeff’s living room lamp and the books that litter every surface until he blacks out.

Jeff either doesn’t care about Johnny’s struggles with sleep, or doesn’t notice.

With time, the younger of the two psychopaths picks up on the other’s little habits. Jeff, when he’s at home, is a very sedentary creature. He lingers in places for uncomfortable amounts of time, seemingly staring off into space, only to snap his attention to the tiniest of noises as if he had been waiting for such a thing to happen all along. He drinks coffee in the morning, but never after eleven, and one cup just before he and Johnny leave for an evening.

Johnny also discovers why there was so much time between meetings and why Jeff didn’t show up at times. Sleep appears to have an alarming effect on Jeff’s face. It tears the cuts around his mouth in places and the teenager wakes up a gory mess. It hurts him too, it seems. He turns down anything that isn’t coffee in the mornings, no matter how much his stomach growls and he doesn’t speak at all for hours after rising.

Then, there are days when Jeff doesn’t bother to rise at all.

Johnny finds himself left to his own devices on these days. At first he just stayed around the apartment and went about business as usual. Several sharp objects thrown in his direction every time he made a loud noise or shined a light too close to Jeff’s space stopped that in its tracks and sent the younger out about the inner city during the day.

_The city._

Just the very thought of the place is met with Johnny’s immediate scorn. That was the one thing his mother had gotten right: house in the suburbs _far away from this shithole._ And, just his luck, it would appear that during daylight hours Jeff’s building was in the middle of _asshole proper._

People in a limited gradient of colors pretending to be tough and fighting over “turf” from opposite sides of a broken and pothole laden street greet Johnny as he comes out of the building every afternoon like clockwork with shouts of “who the fuck is this?” and “get the hell out of my street, noodle boy” and a variety of racial slurs that somehow seemed less hurtful the more Johnny heard them. The next street over, no matter which way he goes, is loaded with children that would whisper and stare at him as he walked down the street only to have their mothers yell at them or a car horn blare them out of the street. To the south side of town was the business district, arguably the easiest to go through since he was everyone’s potential customer instead of personal freakshow.

But the _north side of town._

The north side of town was where Johnny had gone to a _–pretty fuckin’ shitty-_ school as a little kid. He knew this place well and avoided it at all costs unless he was crossing through to get to the public library or the convenience store that kept their freezy machine on at all hours. This is where the snooty people lived. Not even rich people, just snooty. Soccer moms that got by on inflated child support and sugar daddy money sneering down their nose at anything that wasn’t covered in godawful pastel. Desk jockies who pretended to be proper businessmen, complete with wives _and_ mistresses that glared as if their indiscretions were some big secret Johnny could –or wanted to- expose.

Oh, how he hated the city.

So, Johnny frequently avoided it; opting for the five minute walk east to the park or the twenty minute walk west, through two alleys and over an overpass to the bookstore whose logo was stamped on the inside cover of nearly all Jeff’s books.

It’s a small place, really more of a hole in the wall that smells of dust and paper and Johnny considers it his home away from home the moment he steps through the door and the little bell stops ringing. The shop is dim for a bookstore, it must have been something else prior. A residence maybe? The apartment above the place makes the conclusion seem reasonable to Johnny. Outside of the back and side walls there are three additional shelves, with books on both sides, and a bargain table at the front of the shop just across from the checkout counter. Behind the counter is a door that, judging by the placard on it, goes to the business office.

The whole place is run by a solitary woman in her twenties sporting a black ponytail and a series of elaborate tattoos on her arms. She sits on a stool behind the cash register and flashes every customer, Johnny included, a white-toothed smile. Her nametag says “Lilith.”

Every time Johnny visits the place, Lilith is there, on her stool reading books or doing paperwork. She never moves. No matter how long Johnny watches the woman out of the corner of his eye, she does not move. It becomes sort of fascinating in an absurd way, and Johnny makes a point to not go back to the bookstore until he can be decidedly less creepy about it.

He gets enough weird looks as it is.

-=-=-=-=-

One morning, well into his stay with Jeff, the older of the two rises with the sun after two days of being nailed to his bed. Blood drips from the corner of his scarred mouth as he crosses to the kitchen and puts a pot of coffee on and waits for enough to fill his last unbroken mug. Its cousins had all been thrown at Johnny for the crime of asking questions too early.

An hour later, Jeff is mostly blood free and writing plans on a little notepad, passing them across the kitchen table to Johnny as the latter picks at his breakfast. Johnny responds to each note with spoken words and together they hash out a feasible plan for the week. Johnny even manages to get a mark placed on a particularly nasty woman he encountered on his way home from the convenience store. After leaving out the fact that he’d followed her home, of course.

Eventually their conversation, like so many others, fades into uncomfortable silence. Well, to be more accurate, uncomfortable on Johnny’s part. Something about silence is alarming to him now, like there is something that _should_ be happening but _isn’t_ and that needs to be remedied immediately. His thoughts whirl around potential things to fill the silence and have that space be occupied but it all devolves to noise and now he _has_ to say something just to make it stop.

“Can I tell you something?” Johnny blurts out.

Jeff makes a questioning noise. It looks as though he tried to say a word but his face is still too sore and stiff from sleep for dialogue.

“You promise not to get offended?” the younger of the two asks.

Jeff tilts his head and Johnny knows, if he’d been able to, Jeff would be making a face at him. “Would you?” the older asks, but it’s a slurred, garbled noise.

“No,” Johnny laughs. “Your face is lopsided.”

Jeff lowers his mug after stopping mid-sip and just stares at him.

“This-“ Johnny points at his own mouth and waves his finger in a smile pattern, “It’s lopsided.”

“Bullshit.” Another noise-word, this one angrier.

Johnny gestures toward the open bathroom door, confident enough in his observation that it won’t get him injured.

Jeff rises and heads toward the door, Johnny a few steps behind him. The two always left the medicine cabinet open when the mirror wasn’t in use. It was sort of an unspoken rule of the apartment. Johnny leans in the doorway as Jeff stands, one arm braced on the sink, takes a deep breath, and closes the medicine cabinet. There’s a long pause as Jeff stares at his own disfigured face in the mirror. Uncomfortably long. Johnny shifts to the other side of the doorway, again wanting to fill the silence.

Then, suddenly, Jeff starts. “Oh my god.” He tilts his head to the side and holds his hands up to mark the points of his twisted carved-in smile. “It is.”

“Told you.”

Jeff quickly opens the cabinet back up and pulls out a polished straight razor hastily slamming the cabinet closed again. He holds it to his face but hesitates. Lowering the blade, Jeff weighs his options as he stares at his own face in the mirror yet again.

After several false starts, Jeff folds the razor closed and tosses it at Johnny. Surprised, the younger teenager fumbles with it and nearly drops it on the floor. “You do it,” Jeff says when Johnny straightens. “You’ve got an eye for details like this.”

“It’s your _face_!” Johnny argues. Jeff is his friend. His grumpy, serial killing, horrifically disfigured friend, but friend regardless. Jeff let Johnny into his home and has tolerated his existence with more grace than Nny had received from his own mother. He wasn’t going to mutilate him further. “It’s not like…evening up your sideburns or some shit. Wait- can you even grow sideburns?”

“No,” Jeff answers, sweeping past him, pulling a fresh towel out of a kitchen drawer, and crossing to their breakfast table. He tests the surface with his hand before hopping up and sitting on it. “C’mon, we don’t have all day.”

“ _Now?_ ” Johnny is still hesitating in the bathroom doorway like an idiot.

“No, next week.” Jeff deadpans, “Fuck you. Get over here and fix this.”

“I should never have pointed this out to you,” Johnny mumbles, testing the blade and moving to join Jeff at the table.

Jeff laughs at him.

With a deep, not very helpful breath Johnny holds the blade open and maps out Jeff’s face. It’s strange, being so close and staring at the disfigurement in all its gut wrenching detail. The cuts are jagged, hasty and impractically done by a shaking hand. The tears are worse on the left, which was probably done second. He tilts Jeff’s head and he complies with the little movements. His skin is almost leathery with scars and he makes a faint wheezing noise as he breathes through what’s left of his nose. Johnny, to his horror, realizes that once he hears the noise he can’t unhear it and it starts to annoy him quickly.

Grinding his teeth, Johnny measures up where he needs to start the cuts on the right side of Jeff’s face. He picks up the towel on the table and holds it the other young man’s jaw. He presses the blade to skin-

A sharp point pokes Johnny’s skin through his shirt and he jumps a little. Looking down he sees Jeff grasping a knife and aiming it at the vulnerable skin of his belly. When his gaze snaps back up Jeff is staring at him with a sly grin pulled impossibly wide.

“Insurance,” he explains. Then resumes the position Johnny had placed him in. “No pressure.”

Johnny presses the blade back to Jeff’s cheek. Another sharp poke.

The blade cuts smoothly as if the flesh were soft butter in its path. It’s infinitely better than his usually dull blades. In fact, the cut is so smooth it’s almost as if he isn’t slicing, more using the knife to draw lines on Jeff’s skin. Like he’s painting lines of crimson on a stretched canvas, in some weird perversion of a Bob Ross painting tutorial.

The table rattles as Jeff’s grip on the edge tightens. Johnny can feel the tip of the knife pointed at him scrape against his skin in jerky motions. His face may not be able to convey pain, but he is certainly feeling it.

Johnny tries to be quick and precise with his movements. All those years spent holed up in the school’s art room painting finally paying off as he only checks his work in a blink before making decisions. Eventually the right side is even with the left, and in a quick flight of fancy he roughly tilts Jeff’s head the other way and cleans up the more jagged edges on the left.

As soon as Nny pulls the blade away from his skin, Jeff kicks him solidly in the chest with a socked foot. The younger boy goes crashing to the floor, the blade skittering out of his hand across the linoleum, the breath escaping his lungs.

Jeff makes a growling pained sound. When Johnny finally gets a good look at him, Jeff is holding the towel to his face. The white fabric steadily turning red. He pulls the towel away with a gasping breath. Lines of bloody saliva hold on to rough, absorbent thing and pull long dark pink lines that catch the light and make Johnny feel nauseous. Pink and bright red smears and smudges litter Jeff’s pale skin and drip in chaotic rivulets down his neck staining little semicircles on his shirt collar.

He takes several deep, gasping breaths through his mostly open mouth. The motions of his jaw with each breath tug at the pointed edges of the cuts, threatening to split them wider. His teeth are bared and pinked. Out of the corner of his eye he is glaring at the prone teenager, but makes no other moves against him.

The smile is sharp, pointed and perfectly even.

Johnny’s proud of his work.

-=-=-=-=-

Jeff takes the rest of the day to get used to his new face. They hit the first two houses on the list the following night and, for the most part, the rest of the week goes as planned.

Until, of course, Jeff has another one of his down days and they have to call off the hits on the north part of town. Johnny, frustrated, canvases the houses on his own in an attempt to get the tasks done anyway, but the families are too large for him to take on his own. Unless he wanted to get arrested.

Or shot.

When he makes it home, a blood spattered note and an envelope are sitting on his usual beanbag bed-chair:

_Migraine. Slip envelope under landlady’s door for me._

_TODAY, goddamn it._

The handwriting is shaky and strangely large. Johnny casts a disquieted look at the partition separating Jeff’s bed from the rest of the apartment. Well, that explained the down periods.

He took the envelope, marked “RENT: 2A” in neat block letters, and headed back downstairs.

After several failed attempts (and many awkward encounters with the landlady’s blind daughter, which Jeff found absolutely hilarious) over the few weeks Johnny has taken up residence in this building, he eventually figured out which door was the landlady’s and which went to the laundry room.  A quick hop takes Johnny down the last three steps all at once and he slips the envelope under the rightmost door.

As he does so, a slight scoff catches his ear. Johnny looks up to see one of the two men that lived in the apartment above theirs holding a laundry basket and coming up from the laundry room.

_Oh great. This asshole._

“Trying to break in?” the smug prick comments, letting the door slam shut behind him.

“Just paying the rent.” Johnny replies, standing.

The guy looks him up and down. Johnny can almost hear the guy silently judging him with that _fucking face of his._ He wants to beat the guy’s face in.

Before he even can realize what he’s doing, he’s shoved the guy down the stairs.

Johnny, on some level, knows this is a bad idea. He knows the risk of getting caught is enormous and Jeff would probably have an aneurism if he’d been present for that first attack. But Johnny, something in him, just can’t control itself when placed in the line of fire of _that look_. He locks the door behind himself and hurries down the stairs to the twisted, but still breathing, obnoxious neighbor guy.

He ties of the man’s hands with a long-sleeved shirt from his laundry basket, and stuffs a roll of socks in his mouth so he can’t scream. Dragging the man by the armpits, Johnny pulls him to the far side of the room in a dusty corner between the driers and the washers and waits.

Waiting in silence is easier here. The silence is comfortable and patient now not that grinding uncomfortable experience he feels every time things go quiet in the apartment. That sort of growling hunger on the edges of his mind is sated as he watches the man at his feet drift in and out of consciousness.

Johnny isn’t sure how long it takes for the guy to finally wake up, but when he does, Johnny’s ready for it.

“You know what I don’t like?” Johnny remembers to keep his voice down. The man screams around the wool gag in his mouth. Johnny ignores him, “A lot of things actually. But nothing grinds me more than people like you

“How old are you? Thirty?” Johnny taunts, flashing a large blade in front of the man’s face to stop the moronic noises he’s making. “And you live in the same building as a pair of teenagers and then _have the audacity_ to look down your nose as if you expected us to do something better with our lives?” He scoffs, tossing the blade deftly in the air. “If we should be doing better, why shouldn’t you? What makes you so much better than me, hmm? The pompous way you carry yourself? Your own personal delusions?”

Johnny holds the knife to the man’s throat when he starts to shake his head. “I know for a fact that you aren’t any better than the dirt that cakes up under my boots and can’t be knocked loose until I’ve already set foot in my apartment. You are the _worst kind_ of annoyance, and frankly, I’m _sick and fucking tired_ of hearing you fight with your roommate at all hours.”

There was a flash of desperation in the man’s eyes. Fear. It felt like water to a dying man: unnecessary, but appreciated.

Johnny snaps his neck.

It takes some doing, but he manages to set the whole thing to look like an accident. Dragging the body back to the bottom of the stairs and pocketing the roll of socks. He’d been in need of a new pair anyway.

When he finally goes back upstairs, the sun was well up. How long had he been down there? Hours? Had anyone noticed?

Quietly, Johnny picks his way back up the stairs. He heard distant footsteps as he reached his floor.

Paying more attention to the stairs leading to the third floor, Johnny ducks into the apartment with hardly a sound. Shutting the door behind him and leaning against it with a sigh.

When he opens his eyes a disheveled and hellish-looking Jeff was leaning on the kitchen table across the way. He is wearing customary hooded sweatshirt –the black one he used for public affairs- and the scarf he used to cover his face, both of which had been folded out of the way so that Johnny might be able to see the twisted, crazed smile and deep scowl.

“Hey,” Johnny says meekly. “You don’t look so good. Maybe you should go back to slee-“

Johnny blinks and Jeff has pushed off from the table and is darting toward him with a few long strides. He tries to move out of the line of fire, but a knife sinks into his shoulder as he turns and he’s pulled to the ground. He tries to turn his own blade on Jeff as he goes down, but isn’t sure if he scored a hit. His head cracks against the floor as he lands, and he passes out.

He wakes an indeterminate amount of time later. Jeff is a bit more put-together and is looming over him, more curious than threatening.

“Good,” he says, “you aren’t dead.”

“What the _fuck?_ ” Johnny says, looking at his haphazardly patched up shoulder.

“Upstairs guy came down looking for his roommate,” Jeff walks in a tight circle around Johnny’s prone form as he explains, “said he didn’t come back after doing laundry last night. Around the same time you got in and went back out to pay the rent for me. It isn’t hard to put two and two together, jackass.”

Johnny growls against the pain in his arm, “So you fucking stab me and bust my head open? You could have killed me.”

“Well,” Jeff’s voice grew angrier as he spoke, “You don’t listen when I advise you, so I thought a better aversive might be in order. I had no intent to kill you, not here. I just wanted to teach you a very important lesson.”

The younger rested his pounding head against the floor and groaned, “And what lesson is that?”

Jeff waited until Johnny opened his eyes and could see that pale, mangled face looming over him before answering:

“ _Don’t shit where you eat.”_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> HEY LOOK I WROTE A THING AND IT ONLY TOOK ME LIKE A YEAR.  
> Sorry for the long wait guys. I'm working on other big projects and this one, like so many others, took a back burner especially after I lost my notes for it.  
> But I DO INTEND TO FINISH IT, even if it takes a million goddamn years, I will finish this eventually.


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